Storm Cursed

11

I checked my phone on the way to Sherwood’s Toyota and stopped dead. Somehow I’d silenced the phone, and I’d missed a call from Adam. I tried calling him back. This time it rang through to his voice mail.

“Adam called you?” Sherwood asked.

I nodded and checked my voice mail. Sure enough there was a new message from Adam. Two of them. The first voice mail was from around the time we’d left home to come to Uncle Mike’s.

“Hey, sweetheart,” Adam said. “Sorry for being out of communication all day. POTUS decided he wanted to have a day at the zoo. Expect pictures of him bravely petting Warren in tomorrow’s papers.” His voice was very dry, but there was a frisson of excitement behind it.

He’d voted for this president, canceling my vote as apparently we’d done all of my life and would do for the foreseeable future, but Adam didn’t really approve of him. Still, he had a reverence for the office itself that I didn’t feel. The president of the United States had come to visit—and Adam was thrilled.

My worries for him fell away, and I found myself smiling.

“Anyway, we’re all headed home, see you soon.” He ended the message.

Sherwood smiled at me. “POTUS,” he said. “I called it.”

The time stamp on the second message was about five minutes later than the first message. Before I could listen to it, my phone rang again. This time it was my half brother, Gary.

“Kind of busy here,” I said.

“I’ll call back later,” he said. And he hung up.

My half brother had called. And, I remembered abruptly, last night I’d had a dream that I couldn’t remember. A dream that apparently involved Coyote.

I called him back.

“I thought—”

“What did you call me for?” I asked.

“It’s pretty stupid,” he told me.

“Just spit it out,” I said.

“Our progenitor called me a few minutes ago and asked me to call you—and see if you’d reached for your dreams.”

And that was all it took.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

“He is, I suspect, no one’s son,” Gary said apologetically. “Created rather than born. What’s he done?”

“Interfered,” I said.

“For good or ill?”

“I can’t tell,” I said. “I’ll let you know if I survive. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Do you need me to come down?” His voice was serious.

“No,” I said. “Yes. But there’s no way you could arrive in time. If it helps, your part in this might have saved the day. If the day is saved.”

“Good?” he said, a question in his voice.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow.” I disconnected.

“Mercy?” Sherwood asked.

I held up a finger. I needed to think. To absorb what I remembered.

I knew who and what the Hardesty witches were because I’d spent weeks in the mind of Sherwood’s kitten. I knew what they wanted—and Sherwood was on the top of their list. I knew what they could do—and I didn’t want any of the wolves within a hundred miles of those witches.

Magda—that was the name of the zombie witch—was a Love Talker, all right. And her power was a lot bigger than Elizaveta had thought. I was pretty sure she would have no trouble controlling a werewolf, because she had taken them before.

“Mercy, are you all right?” Sherwood asked.

“I’ve been thinking,” I told him. “Since the pack is fine—” They were. I had to do this without telling a single lie. Sherwood would know if I lied. “—could you drop me off at the garage?”

He frowned at me. “Sure.”

I nodded briskly and got into the passenger seat of the car.

We were on our way when Sherwood said, “Does the reason I’m dropping you off at your shop have something to do with the phone call from your brother?”

I nodded. “Yes. I have some thinking to do—and it’s a madhouse at home right now. The shop is quiet.”

He smiled. “That it is.”

I watched the road ahead of us and asked, “How is your cat doing?”

“I stopped in to check on him after work,” he said. “It looks like he’s going to make it.”

“Good,” I said.

Sherwood’s lips turned up again. “He purred when I held him.”

“Tough cat,” I said.

“Yes.” He sounded happy.

When he pulled into the dark parking lot, he insisted on coming into the garage with me and sniffing around for intruders. He wasn’t happy when he left, but he did leave.

As soon as he turned out of the parking lot, I listened to Adam’s second message. I had waited until Sherwood was gone because I didn’t think that Coyote would have timed my brother’s phone call so precisely without a reason.

“Hey, love,” said Adam. “Elizaveta just called. She wants to check something out at her house, and she doesn’t want to do it alone. I’m going to go pick her up. Don’t worry. Love you.”

Yes, I thought, I’d have had trouble convincing Sherwood that I just needed a quiet place to think for a while if he’d heard that message.

I grabbed a set of keys, turned out the light again, and relocked everything up. Then I got into Stefan’s bus and headed for Elizaveta’s house for some recon. As I traveled I called Stefan’s phone and got his voice mail—which I’d expected.

“I stole your bus,” I told him. “And I am headed to Elizaveta’s to look for Adam. I believe that the Hardesty witches are there, and that they have Adam and Senator Campbell. If I don’t call you back in a few hours, would you call Darryl?” Hopefully Marsilia didn’t plan on keeping Stefan bound and gagged for long. “Tell him that I think the zombie witch can control werewolves and he should take precautions.”

I found a place to park the bus next to a haystack about a half mile away from Elizaveta’s. With any luck, it wouldn’t draw too much attention. It wasn’t exactly a stealth vehicle, but at night it wasn’t as noticeable as it was in the daylight. I gave Scooby a pat on his fuzzy head for luck, then stripped to my skin, opened the driver’s door, and hopped out.

I shut the door quietly and shifted to coyote. Then I went off to do the thing that coyotes do best—sneak.

There were lights on in Elizaveta’s house. I slunk down the edge of the driveway from shadow to shadow, moving as slowly as I could bear. Quick movement catches the eye. If I had been dealing with mere humans, I’d have trotted right along. But I had no idea how well the witches could see in the dark, so I crept.

Elizaveta’s driveway was nearly a quarter mile long, and there was a newish RV parked between the house and the garage. Adam’s SUV was parked right in front of the house, as was a Subaru Impreza. I watched the yard from under a raspberry bush. The underbrush had been cleared out and the bush trimmed, so there was plenty of room for me to hide.

I watched for maybe five minutes but saw no movement inside or out—despite the lights in the house.

Maybe they were all in the basement.

That thought had me sliding out of my hiding place. I was halfway out when a sound made me freeze.

A bluish-gray wolf, distinctively marked with darkened feet, muzzle, and tail, walked across the yard. Adam. The deliberate pace of his movement, his pricked ears, and the slow swing of his head told me that he was on patrol.

I stepped out of the shadows and let him see me.

He walked right past me, as if I weren’t there.

I am to patrol the grounds and alert them if I come across anything that might threaten them or is unusual.

The thought brushed my mind lightly, as if I were overhearing a conversation that had nothing to do with me. It whispered down our mate bond, and if I had been ten feet farther away, I doubt it would have touched me.

There is nothing threatening or unusual in a coyote running around Finley, he noted. Just for a moment his gold eyes brushed mine, and then he moved on.

But if I were that coyote, I would leave.

And then, as if he could not even think the name, an image floated in my mind’s eye: a wolf’s face with a red X across it.

Adam was warning me not to let the pack come here.

Of course I didn’t leave.

If Adam was here, I could safely assume the senator and Elizaveta were also here. So all I had to do was get a look at their defenses. I had the bare bones of a plan in my head—I didn’t like it and I wasn’t sure it would work.

I expected my explorations to last longer, even given that I now had to avoid Adam. But after the third zombie in twenty feet, I had all the answer I needed.

I was going to need help.

They had Adam, I thought, trotting back to the bus; I couldn’t afford to give them the whole pack. But I had other friends to call upon, which was a good thing. No matter what orders Coyote had given me, I wasn’t going to be able to kill those witches all by myself if the witches had an army of zombies to protect them.

I dressed, then pulled out my phone. I had a message from Warren.

Warily I listened to it.

“Mercy, when you get this, call me back.”

Nope.

I called Zee instead. I knew, as Larry had told me, that Siebold Adelbertsmiter would help me. I called him, knowing exactly what that help could cost him. But I was hoping that Zee was as formidable as I thought he was—and therefore the Gray Lords would be looking for any excuse not to enforce their death penalty on him.

After I told him who else I was planning to ask for help, I gave Zee the option of staying away. I’m not sure if I would have given him the option had I not been absolutely certain of Zee’s response.

“Nein,” Zee said. “These witches hurt my son and tried to kill you. The Gray Lords will afterward do as they will. Should we succeed in saving Senator Campbell, the Gray Lords will be quite happy with us, I think.”

“You don’t think they can ensnare you?” I asked.

“Liebling,” he said. “I am not infallible. But witchcraft doesn’t work so well on the fae. I have had a talk with Uncle Mike tonight. Uncle Mike informed me that the goblin king was quite clear that I should avoid direct confrontation with the witches.”

He’d said very nearly the same thing to me, I thought.

“I take it to mean that as long as I fight the zombies and minions and leave the witches to your”—there was something in his voice I could not read—“other ally, we can be reasonably certain . . .”

“Of what?” I asked when he paused.

“Certain of doing what the goblin king wishes me to do,” said Zee. “Since they have just killed his favorite child, I do not think the goblin king would advise us to do anything that would aid them.”

I’d kind of thought that the goblin king had been telling me not to ask Zee for help. Interesting that Zee and I had the exact opposite takes on that advice. I decided to believe Zee because it cheered me up and made me feel less guilty.

He continued, “I will not leave you alone to battle them with no one that I trust to have your back. If you are not here in ten minutes to pick me up, I will drive my truck to the witch’s house.”

And that ended that discussion.

But when I pulled up to Zee’s house, it wasn’t just Zee who came out. Tad, looking as though he were dressed for a Lord of the Rings reunion, carried a long duffel bag that probably contained some of Zee’s weapons.

“I know, I know,” Tad said, opening the sliding door and setting the bag on the floor. He opened the front passenger door and said, “It’s you or me, dog.” He picked up Scooby and set him in the two-butt seat that was the middle seat of the bus. To me he acknowledged, “It’s a weird shirt, but Dad insisted.”

“Is it mithril?” I asked in awe. “You glow in the dark.”

Tad looked down at himself and let out a curse. “It’s doing it again, Dad.”

“I regret the costume-like appearance,” Zee said. “It wasn’t costume-like when I made it. But the tunic will redirect witchcrafting aimed at him. Some of the time.”

He leaned into the bus and tapped the shoulder of the mail-like overcoat that Tad wore. The brightness winked out and it blended with the darkness almost too well.

“It hasn’t been out in a good long time,” said Zee. “It’s a little giddy.”

“Giddy,” I said.

Zee climbed into the bus, slid the door shut, and then made his way to the far back. It wasn’t that he minded sharing a seat with Scooby; it was that Zee always sat so that no one could sit behind him. It was why he had a truck.

“Zee,” I said. “Not that I don’t love Tad, but I thought it was only going to be you flinging yourself into the hands of fate. The Gray Lords might decide that you are scary enough to leave alone, but Tad isn’t.”

“The Gray Lords will hold me responsible for Dad’s actions anyway,” Tad said, belting himself in. “I might as well contribute. Where are we going next?”

“I am not sure,” I said, and pulled out my phone.

“You haven’t asked yet?” asked Zee.

“Nope,” I told him. “I was putting it off until the last minute.”

“Mercy,” Marsilia answered. “Have you killed them yet?”

“Nope,” I told her. “I’ve lost track. Do you owe me one, or do I owe you?”

Wulfe was waiting for us when I drove up to the seethe.

He’d been a teenager when he died and he looked it. Tonight he’d dressed in a black hoodie, jeans, and white Converse tennis shoes. He looked like he should be going to a rave or a kegger. He also had both of his hands. Stefan had cut one of them off the last time I’d seen him.

Vampires weren’t werewolves—they couldn’t just grow them back. I was pretty sure they couldn’t just grow them back.

He bent down to look in the car to see who was in it. He did an exaggerated double take when he saw Tad’s magic garb. Tad huffed indignantly. Satisfied with Tad’s reaction, Wulfe opened the sliding door and got in. He belted Scooby in before he belted himself.

The hair on the back of my neck tried to run away. I was really glad that Zee was sitting behind Wulfe to keep watch. If anyone was a match for Wulfe, it was Zee. I was also glad that Scooby was in the seat directly behind me.

“If I’d known we were going medieval, I’d have worn my hair shirt. I’m sure I have it around somewhere.” The vampire snapped his fingers. “Damn. I left it at home. It will probably be another half millennium before I get a chance to wear it again. Oh well. These things do tend to come back in fashion.”

A lot of the vampires have accents. But Wulfe, today, sounded like any other teenager born and raised in the Tri-Cities. Other than the fact that I would be surprised if there were more than one or two teenagers born and raised here who would even know what a hair shirt was.

He raised his head and sniffed like a dog. “You brought me a present? How kind. Give. Give it to me.”

Tad looked at me and I shook my head. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Wulfe made an impatient sound. “You have something that belongs to the witches.”

I had grabbed the box with the broken athame when I got out of Sherwood’s car. It hadn’t been difficult. I’d been carrying it while he drove—and he’d been worried about making sure the garage was safe before he left.

Sherwood’s wolf had thought that he could use it to hunt down the witches. I didn’t want him anywhere near these witches, so I had taken it when he wasn’t looking.

I reached between the front seats, grabbed the take-out box, and held it up.

“Ooooo,” Wulfe said, taking it. “Looky here. What naughty children to let this out of their hands. Pity it’s broken.”

“Why is that?” I asked him.

“Because the witches could have done all sorts of nasty things with that tonight, and I could have watched them. If they really do have an almost completed coven—”

I had given Marsilia a play-by-play of the last day, which had ended about a block from the seethe. I had left nothing out. I didn’t know if it had been a mistake to tell her that there was a witch out there who could control werewolves, but she’d told me about Frost, who could control vampires, hadn’t she?

Evidently, if he knew about Sherwood’s assessment that the witches were running with the power of an almost coven behind them, Wulfe must have been listening the whole time.

“—they could have used it to take over anyone who held this knife. Lots of mischief to be done. I’d say they killed five or six people to make this athame—and that’s if they had plenty of practice. They won’t be happy that it is broken. It’s useless now.”

He tossed it back to the front seat and the box spilled the separate pieces onto the floor. Tad bent over and collected them while I put the bus in gear and pulled away from the seethe. Marsilia’s home base gave me the creeps.

Not that driving away from the seethe would help much, not when Wulfe was in my car.

“What does it mean?” I asked him. “That there are ten families in their coven. A lot of what I know about the witches comes from Wikipedia; it told me that a coven had thirteen witches.”

I could feel him staring at me. I was careful to keep my eyes on the road.

“I get the best spells from Wiki,” he said. “Have you read what it says about werewolves? I keep editing the article, but someone—and I think it’s Bran Cornick—keeps changing it back.”

“Vampire,” said Zee. “If you don’t answer the question, I will.”

“So touchy,” said Wulfe, admiration in his tone. But then he said, “Back in the bad old days, a coven of witches was thirteen witches, one from each of thirteen families. If you had a complete coven, then you were limited in power only by your imagination.” He sighed. “But, since they are witches, usually that only lasted a few months or a year at a time before someone fought with someone else and the next thing you know, there would be bodies all over the place. Untidy folk, witches.”

“Give me an example of what they did,” I said.

“Stonehenge,” Wulfe said promptly. “The Little Ice Age. A couple of volcanic eruptions. They weren’t responsible for the Black Plague itself—but I know that in several instances they used plagues to discipline rulers who worked against them. The Great Plague of London killed a hundred thousand people in eighteen months. I think Bran himself took care of that coven.”

“Holy wow,” I breathed.

“But they don’t have a real coven,” said Wulfe. “The best the Hardesty witches managed—with nine different families represented in their coven—was 1816.”

Zee grunted.

I had a history degree, but 1816 didn’t ring any bells. The War of 1812 ended in 1815. In 1817 James Monroe became president of the United States—and I only knew that because I’d written a paper on him in college.

Wulfe was waiting.

“What happened in 1816?” I asked.

“It was the Year Without a Summer in New England,” said Tad.

“I see it isn’t true,” said Wulfe, “what they say about modern education.” He sighed. “Pitiful attempt, really; with a full coven they could have frozen the whole Atlantic seaboard for a couple of years.”

Enough of that talk or I was going to pull over and run screaming into the night. I was already scared. We only had two witches to deal with, I reminded myself.

“Elizaveta said she knew when a witch came into her territory,” I said, thinking out loud. “Will they know when you get too close?”

“This was my territory a long time before Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya came here,” Wulfe said, his voice suddenly a purr of power. “So subtly did I lay my hold on the land that she did not, does not even feel it—no more than did the new intruders. They will not know me until I choose.”

“I thought the vampires called you the Wizard,” Tad said. “Are you a witch or a wizard?”

Wulfe preened. “Yes,” he said.

Witches had power over the living—animals, trees, people. Wizards manipulated objects with magic—bending spoons, moving furniture, that kind of thing. Wizards were a lot more rare than witches because witches deliberately bred themselves for power. I didn’t know if wizards ever tried it. Maybe they did. But I’d never heard of a wizard family. That he was both . . . and a vampire as well . . .

“Why did they set up at Elizaveta’s?” I asked, changing the subject back to the matter at hand. “Isn’t that a little obvious?”

“Misery is a thing that seeps into the walls and the floors,” Zee said. “A house like Elizaveta’s would add power to their spells and protections. Black magic would not be driven from a place where it has taken up residence without a powerful blessing.”

“The only place better for their purposes in the Tri-Cities would have been the seethe,” said Wulfe. “And they did try that, didn’t they? When Frost came up. If Frost had won back in November, we’d have had no way to prevail today. Funny how fate works out.”

I glanced into the rearview mirror to see Wulfe smiling, his eyes fixed out the window. Wulfe had been on the wrong side of that fight. Maybe.

He caught me looking and his smile widened until it displayed his delicate fangs. “Go ahead and ask me,” he said.

“Whose side were you on?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” he lied.

“Why do you have both hands?” I asked.

“Because two is better than one,” he said.

He saw me looking at him in the mirror again and blew me a kiss.

“Don’t encourage him, Mercy,” said Zee. “And you might look where you are going. If you have a wreck before we get there, we might be stuck out in the open when the sun comes up. That would be a shame.”

Wulfe laughed, his whole body shaking.

I took Zee’s advice then and put my eyes front and center.

“There will be zombies,” I said. “I don’t know how many or what kind. But they were thick on the ground when I explored about an hour ago.”

“Human mostly,” said Wulfe. “I went out and peeked last night.” I gave him a look of surprise.

“Of course I checked them out,” Wulfe said. “A good vampire always knows his enemy’s secrets. A few dogs and the like, but mostly human.” He paused. “And the ogre.”

“Ogre?” asked Tad. “An ogre zombie?”

“It was several hundred years old, I think,” Wulfe said. “They had a few very-well-made zombies—made by a different witch.” He beamed a smile and I realized I was watching him again. If I wrecked the Mystery Machine, Stefan would be unhappy.

“Such craftsmanship,” Wulfe said. “You just don’t find zombies like that anymore. Because the lady who made them had an unfortunate accident with one of her pets. The Hardestys have such hope for Magda, you know, because she has the same combination of gifts. But if you ask me, she is far too careless with her workings.”

Wulfe sounded like someone gossiping about his neighbors. And he knew more about the witches than I’d thought he did. More than I’d gathered. Hopefully he would be on our side this time.

“I brought one home to examine, to be sure,” he said. “It was about two centuries, give or take a year. He was exquisite, not a whiff of rot on him. My mother’s coven would have been envious. He could have passed for human, I think, unless you had reason to look very closely—or talk to him. I am positive it was Lieza’s work. And I think she was the only one who would have been foolhardy enough to try raising an ogre.”

“A zombie ogre,” said Tad. “An ogre zombie.”

“Do you have a glitch?” asked Wulfe. “Or do you always say the same phrase over and over?”

“They have to be well made not to rot,” Zee said. “If they are older, they get smarter. Don’t fret, vampire. Tad and I will take care of the zombies. Even the ogre,” Zee said. “Once we are done with them, we will aid you with den Hexen. The witches.”

Wulfe started to bob his head, as if he were listening to drums. Or my heartbeat. The rat.

He bobbed faster as he spoke. “I can deal with one of the witches—that will leave the other to you, Coyote’s daughter. Do you know how to kill a witch?”

“Nope,” I said, though I was pretty sure that if I could get close enough, my cutlass could do the job. I was really glad I’d started carrying that cutlass wherever I went.

“I wouldn’t shoot at them,” Wulfe advised. “Witches this old can protect themselves from bullets.”

“Noted,” I said. I’d pulled the gun from the safe at work, another Sig. It was now in its concealed-carry holster in the small of my back. I’d never regretted having a gun with me in a fight.

“Don’t worry, Mercy,” said Tad heavily. “Witches die like everyone else.”

I gave him a startled glance that he didn’t see. I wondered if that was the something he’d learned in college that had seen him return home lacking the indomitable cheer he used to carry with him wherever he went.

“Pretty basic plan,” observed Wulfe.

We didn’t know enough to make more extensive plans.

“Kill the bad guys,” Tad said. “Kill the dead guys again.”

“Hey!” said Wulfe with mock affront. “I think I belong to both of those groups.”

“Except for our allies,” I said. “Are you our ally?”

Wulfe smiled at me and said nothing. I realized I wasn’t watching where I was going again. If we all survived, I’d make someone else drive so I didn’t have to have Wulfe lurking behind me.

We did work out a better plan, but Tad wasn’t wrong about the basics of it: kill the bad guys, lay the zombies to rest. We did not specify that Wulfe got to pick a witch and I had to take the other one. Whoever had a chance to kill them would do it.

I parked the van in the same place I’d found earlier this evening. Hopefully none of the pack would drive by it and figure out where I’d gone. I had turned off my phone after I picked up Wulfe. No sense making it easy for them to find me.

About halfway to Elizaveta’s I’d begun to feel a bit of pull from the pack ties. Adam would have been able to find me—find any of the pack he wanted to locate. But they weren’t the Alpha, and the best they could (hopefully) do would be to know that I was terrified out of my mind.

Zee had had another word with the tunic that Tad wore, and Tad became very, very difficult to see. Wulfe gave a soft whistle when he saw it change.

“So that’s what that is,” he said. “I thought that surcoat was lost in the War of the Roses.”

“Someone made it,” said Zee. “Someone took it. Someone took it back. It was not lost.”

“Hush now, miscreants,” I said. “We’re hunting witches.”

Tad, doubtless hearing the edge of utter terror that I was trying to cover up with humor, ruffled my hair. “We’ve got your back.”

“So do the zombies,” said Wulfe in a whisper that sent the hairs on the back of my neck climbing right onto the top of my head.

“Shut up, Wulfe,” I said. “I’m scared enough.”

“No,” Wulfe said, a little sadly or possibly a little smugly, “I don’t think you are.”

After that optimistic observation, we all lapsed into silence.

We could have approached from the front. Wulfe pointed out that they doubtless would have alarms all around the property. If Elizaveta had really gone over to their side, they might even have access to several circles of her protections. No, I didn’t know exactly what that meant, other than it was a bad thing.

But we voted three to one to approach from the rear—which had us traipsing through someone else’s property before we marched onto Elizaveta’s hayfield. After ten minutes of stumbling through the neighbor’s alfalfa field, I was pretty sure that Wulfe had been right, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.

Zee finally put a hand under my elbow. The old fae trod through the rough ground as if it were a flat field in daylight. Wulfe and Tad just ghosted through, too. I could have made a better show as a coyote—but that would have meant leaving my weaponry behind.

The first circle, we discovered, was halfway through Elizaveta’s neighbor’s field.

“Huh,” said Wulfe, from somewhere ahead of me.

“Hold up,” said Tad.

Zee stopped and I did, too.

Wulfe turned his head, looking at something I couldn’t see.

“That’s well done,” he said. “There’s a ward circle here.” He swept a hand ahead of him. “Well, not really a circle, more of a square—but that’s okay for something like this. Just a warning line. She’d have felt every squirrel or coyote”—he didn’t look at me—“that ran across it, but still . . .”

“She?” I asked.

“This is Elizaveta’s work,” Wulfe said. “What does it say that she has activated it?”

“Not much,” said Zee. “We can speculate, of course. Perhaps she has joined forces with them. Or perhaps they found the key to the house protections when they held Elizaveta’s family.”

“Yeah,” said Wulfe with theatrical sadness. “It doesn’t tell us much.” He scuffed his toe into the ground with exaggerated disappointment. In a five-year-old it would have been cute. In a very scary vampire it was . . . cute.

He bent down and drew a line in the dirt with his finger about two feet long. “If you will all step over the border right here?”

We did, and he brushed the marks out with his fingers.

Wulfe continued to take point. Ostensibly, this was so that he could keep an eye out for the kinds of things that we could not. Truthfully, there was no way I would have been able to let him trail behind me when I couldn’t keep track of where he was. I don’t think I was alone in that feeling.

It was Zee who held a hand up the next time. “Witch,” he said in a soft murmur, his attention focused ahead of us, “can you keep a battle quiet?”

I felt it, too. The feeling of wrongness that I was beginning to associate with zombies.

Wulfe frowned. “All of the zombies are confined to the yard,” he said.

“Evidently not,” said Zee. “Witch, keep this quiet if you can. Boy, draw your weapon. Mercy—do not try to shoot or stab this one. Your blade is fine, but it is not one of mine. It will not penetrate an ogre’s hide.”

Wulfe raised an eyebrow either in mild offense at the gruff order or in mild surprise at the knowledge that the zombie ogre was around, but he closed his eyes and began moving his hands in patterns. His fingers, I noted, were flexible, like a pianist’s—even on the hand that I’d seen Stefan cut off.

Subtle magic infused the air and the atmosphere attained that odd hollow quality that I associated with the full moon dance. Pack magic sealed the sound on such nights so that only the wolves and their prey could hear the howls of the hunt.

The ogre stepped out of the shadows, shadows that hadn’t been there because we were out in an open field where there was nothing but knee-deep alfalfa, carrying an eight-foot-long wooden fence post in one beefy hand. It brought the post smashing down on Wulfe—who took two steps to the side without ceasing his magic-making.

I had never seen an ogre in its real form before. I’d met one at Uncle Mike’s, but I’d only ever seen her in her human guise—tall, slim, and disapproving of the chaos of the birthday party we’d been celebrating. Tad’s fourteenth, as I recalled.

This ogre was eight feet tall and weighed in at probably four hundred to five hundred pounds. A stiff ruff of bright orange hair ringed its neck and then rose up the back of its head, giving the appearance of a cross between a Mohawk and the crest of a cockatoo. There were seams in its skin, tidily stitched up. One ran across its forehead. One looped its left arm—and as soon as I noted that, I could see that its left arm was a little longer and the wisps of hair growing on the forearm were dark brown. Stitches ringed both legs just below the knee . . . right where Sherwood’s leg had been taken off, I thought with a chill.

That pet who had killed the master-zombie maker that Wulfe had been so disturbingly impressed with. I wondered if it had been a werewolf.

Like, presumably, Wulfe’s stolen zombie, this one had no smell of rot. If I hadn’t had the past couple of weeks to get a good taste of what zombies smell like, I wasn’t sure I’d have picked the ogre out as a zombie. And it had used magic to conceal itself.

Mindful of Zee’s assessment of my capabilities, I drew my cutlass but took up a stance just behind and to the left of Wulfe.

“Always happy to shield a lady,” said Wulfe, a little breathlessly.

“I figure that when it’s occupied smashing you to jelly, I might get a lucky shot at its eye,” I responded. “I don’t care how tough a creature is, I’ve never seen one shake off a cutlass in its eye.”

“Okay,” said Wulfe cheerfully. “Happy to oblige by distracting the ogre with my grisly remains.”

After that first attack, though, the ogre didn’t get another chance at Wulfe. I’d seen Zee fight before. And I’d seen Tad. But I’d never seen them fight together, armed with their favorite weapons.

It hurt a little. Somewhere in my head, I had Tad pictured, always, as the bright-eyed, brash, and self-assured little boy who’d run his father’s garage by himself for weeks. His mother had just died from cancer and his father, the immortal smith, had tried to drink himself to oblivion. Tad was capable, cheery, confident—and ten years old in my head, until that fight.

He had a pair of hatchets, one in each hand, and a bigger axe strapped to his back. The tunic rippled light so it was difficult to keep track of him, so I mostly saw him in snatches of still movement—midleap six feet in the air throwing one of the hatchets. That hatchet ended up in the ogre’s left elbow. The next time I caught a glimpse of him, he was rolling on the ground to get beneath the stroke of that big fence post. He was beautiful and deadly—and decidedly not an innocent, if competent, ten-year-old boy.

If Tad was shadow, then Zee was sunlight. His sword blazed orange and red and hissed as it drew dark lines on the ogre’s skin, howled when it slid through flesh and bone. Zee didn’t drop his glamour, and it would have been odd for someone who didn’t know who and what he was to see an old man moving with such grace and power. He didn’t appear to move fast or use any particular effort. He’d step back and the fence post would slide by his face—not by inches but by millimeters. He simply moved his hand and his sword would cut through the ogre’s knee joint as if it were cheese, leaving the ogre’s severed flesh burning sullenly on both sides of the cut.

It was an amazing, beautiful, fearful dance and it didn’t take them a full minute to disable and then, with a smooth, full-bodied swing of the deadly blazing sword, behead the ogre. Zee’s sword quit blazing and left us in a darkness that seemed darker than before he’d drawn his weapon.

Wulfe stepped forward and touched the body, pulling out a tuft of the red bristle. He spoke a few words and then planted the hair in the ground.

“She’ll not know it’s gone for a while,” Wulfe said. “My wards kept her from feeling its demise and this will keep its leash from springing back to her. But if she looks for it, she’ll know it’s gone.”

“The ogre clans in Scotland had a young one go missing a few centuries back,” murmured Zee. “I’ll let them know that we found him and gave him release.”

I don’t know how anyone else was affected by that fight. Zee seemed, if anything, more somber. Tad’s battle alertness precluded me reading anything else off him. And Wulfe, Wulfe was himself. But I felt a little more hopeful at the evidence of my comrades’ capabilities. Anyone who could kill a zombie ogre might not be hopeless against a pair of witches, right?

Elizaveta’s boundary fence was marked by a row of poplars thick enough to block her neighbors’ observation. It also kept us from having a good view of anything happening near the house.

“There’s a fire over there,” said Tad softly. “In the backyard, I think.”

He was right. The light flickering through the trees had too much movement in it to be coming from a lightbulb.

“Elizaveta had a firepit built in the center of her patio in the backyard,” I said. The patio was large, the size of half of a basketball court, which was what its previous owners had used it for. The basketball hoop was still there, but the firepit made future basketball games unlikely.

I could smell a bit of smoke and some burned things that weren’t anything I’d scented in a campfire. But there was something wrong. This close, the scent should have been a lot stronger.

“Fire is a good aid to magic of any kind,” Zee commented. “Perhaps they are trying to work something now?”

Wulfe closed his eyes and raised a hand—the one that Stefan had cut off—palm out toward Elizaveta’s house.

“I don’t know what they are doing at the moment,” he said. “But they aren’t keeping a leash on their dead things. They’ve just let them wander inside the circle Elizaveta laid around the place.” He tutted. “Careless of them. Wait up a minute.”

There was a rush of magic that fluttered by me like a storm of tree leaves. A much more powerful burst of magic than I’d ever felt from him, so I was able to get a better sense of his magic than I had before. It did not smell like black witchcraft . . . or gray witchcraft, either. It smelled clean as the driven snow.

Wulfe was a white witch?

It boggled my mind. I’d seen him torture and kill with my own two eyes. I expected gray. Black magic I’d have noticed, but gray magic doesn’t actually smell that different from vampire magic.

As a vampire, he could coax willing cooperation from any human he fed from. I’d seen him do it. I’d seen them beg him to torture them (there are a lot of reasons Wulfe is at the top of my scary monster chart). He didn’t need to use black magic if he didn’t want to.

I just hadn’t expected him not to use dark magic at all. It didn’t seem in keeping with the vampire I knew him to be.

“I’ve sent her creatures to . . . well, not sleep, they don’t sleep. But I’ve made them settle. They won’t notice us as we pass. She’ll have to call them to her to get them up and moving.”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “I could just break her hold. Then she couldn’t send them after us, but the circle wouldn’t hold them in. They could go on a killing spree and you’d be weeks hunting all of them down. It might be fun.”

“A disaster,” said Zee. “Keep them in and let Tad and me hunt them. We’ll keep them off you.”

Wulfe pursed his lips, then nodded. “Okeydokey. We’ll leave them be, then. But you should know that some of the zombies are very near the back of Elizaveta’s house—probably in the presence of the witches.”

In the car, he’d promised that he could quiet the zombies without any of the witches knowing what he’d done. But maybe he hadn’t expected them to be so near the witches.

“Will they have felt what you did?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said. “But they might notice that the beasties are unresponsive and wake them back up before we’re ready for them.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can you get me across the circle without alerting the witches?”

My part in our plans was that I would scout out whatever the witches were doing, come back, and make a report. Then we’d work out what to do from there.

“Think so,” he said. “Maybe. Ish.”

I rolled my eyes. “Good to know.”

And I stripped down to my skin, dropping weapons to one side and clothing to the other.

“Ni-ice,” said Wulfe in a tone that would have made Adam take off his head. “Hey, is that a wolf’s paw print or a coyote’s below your belly button?”

It was really dark out. If he was seeing my paw-print tattoo, then his night vision was as good as any wolf’s. He was a vampire, so I should have expected it.

I am not shy. Shapeshifters—werewolves or coyote shifters like me—get over things like modesty very quickly. But knowing Wulfe was staring at my tattoo made me feel vulnerable. If I were never naked where he could see me again, it would be too soon.

“Yes,” I told him.

I shifted into my coyote as quickly as I could.

Wulfe dropped to all fours at the same time. “Follow me,” he said, and crawled through the fence and into the trees.

With no choice, I followed him. Just on the other side of the trees, Wulfe put a hand out, with odd deliberation, in front of him, and then did the same with the other hand. Then he straightened his knees until he was in a London Bridge kind of arch.

“You can run over the top of me or under me,” he said. “I’m keeping the connection of the spell going—so don’t cut me in half or it will sound an alarm.”

Unwilling to have him on top of me, I ran over the top of him. He settled down on the ground without moving his hands. “Remember to come back this way,” he said. “I’ll be here. Waiting for you.” He batted his eyelashes at me and mouthed, Only you.

I put Wulfe behind me every which way I could and concentrated on traveling unseen. I didn’t make the mistake of running. Quick movement attracts the attention of prey and predator alike. I found a game trail that smelled of coyote and headed, more or less, in the direction I wanted.

Traveling down the trail meant less noise—and I wouldn’t be moving grass around. But it would also be a place that traps could be set and patrols run. The zombies were, hopefully, quiescent, but Adam wouldn’t be affected. When trying to hide, running right down the road was always the wrong decision. Except that a game trail wasn’t exactly a road. Decisions, decisions.

Decisions with Adam’s life on the line. And the senator’s. It wasn’t that I wasn’t concerned about him. We were, our pack, obliged legally and ethically to make sure he was safe. I didn’t love the senator, however. And I was pretty sure that freeing Adam of the witch’s spell—Wulfe had a harrowing suggestion on that—would make the senator safer, too.

I decided to chance it, and took the trail. I passed by a few of the witch’s zombies as I skulked toward the house. The first was a squirrel. I don’t know that I’d have noticed it except that it was standing motionless on the game trail I was following. Squirrels are seldom motionless for long—and this one wasn’t breathing.

There was a boy, about the same age as the Salas boy, the age that Aiden appeared to be. Like the squirrel, he stood absolutely still. As Wulfe had promised, the boy didn’t appear to notice me, even though I walked quite close to him.

He didn’t smell dead. Like the ogre, there was no sense of rot to him. If he hadn’t been caught in Wulfe’s spell, I wondered if I’d have realized he was a zombie at all.

Wulfe had indicated that the well-made zombies were old. I hoped this one was old. Hoped that no one in the Tri-Cities was missing a young boy. It wasn’t particularly rational to think that the zombie would be less tragic if the child’s death had been a century ago—or yesterday. But rational people wouldn’t have been sneaking through the fields behind a house occupied by black witches, either—so there was that.

I counted five more zombies and hoped they were set to watch the path I traveled. Hoped they weren’t evenly dispersed, because that would mean there were more zombies than even I’d estimated, based on my earlier run. Maybe too many for the old fae and his son to take care of. I drew even more comfort from the way they’d taken down the ogre zombie.

I kept my eyes away from the fire blazing up in the backyard of Elizaveta’s house because I wanted to keep my night vision. Even so, glimpses told me that it climbed into the night sky, five or six feet high, with as much abandoned fury as if there weren’t a fire ban on for fear of lighting the dry shrub steppe that surrounded us. Just last week, a fire had burned the west slope of Badger Mountain, taking a manufactured house and two empty barns with it.

The smoke smell had increased tremendously as soon as I’d crossed the ward at the edge of Elizaveta’s property. Smoke eventually overwhelmed my sense of smell—and that smoke had more than dry logs in it. Now that I was closer I could pick out various scents, most of which I did not recognize.

Herbs of some sort, I thought, though I couldn’t place them beyond that. I knew what lots of herbs smelled like normally, but didn’t make a habit of burning them. Other than it wasn’t marijuana (because that was almost an incense in college), I didn’t know what kinds of herbs they had tossed in the fire.

I also smelled burnt hair and flesh, but I tried not to think about that. The bond between Adam and me was still present. I’d hoped that if I got closer to him, it would . . . do something. Tell me something. But it just sat there—an unresponsive, greasy lump.

The noises from the backyard were oddly muted. Either my hearing was going or they had some magic working to hide what they were doing from eavesdroppers. Likely a human wouldn’t have heard a thing. Maybe they wouldn’t even have seen the fire.

The trail crossed the edge of the corner of the garden and I left it there to take the rest of the trip on my own.

I chose to go through the garden because a coyote wouldn’t stand out among the odd lumps of vegetation the same way it would in the tidy yard. I tried not to think about what the pack had found buried in the garden—I wouldn’t have eaten anything grown here on a bet, and coyotes eat pretty much anything.

Elizaveta’s garden was huge, filled with flowers, herbs, and vegetables. The sides were edged in grapevines that provided a thick cover for me. Not that anyone staring into that fire stood a chance of seeing a coyote in a garden at night, anyway.

I was making my cautious way through the pumpkin vines when I felt eyes on me. I froze. When that didn’t alleviate the feeling, I turned in a slow circle. Nothing.

I looked up.

Just in front of me, where the garden gave way to open lawn, was a scarecrow with a dead crow on its head. The crow peered at me with bright button eyes.

“Mercy,” it whispered to me with the voice a cornstalk might have, soft and dry with a bit of rattle.