Storm Cursed

12

“Mercy, what are you doing in my garden?” the bird said, then chuckled, a dry, whispery sound. “Naughty little coyote.”

Then it raised its head—the movement engendered by a flash of gray magic—and cried in a loud voice designed to carry into the house, “Coyote, coyote, coyote is here. Coyote, coyote, coyote is here.”

I slipped into the dense foliage of the grapevines and froze, hardly daring to breathe.

We’d planned for this, or something like this. Without Wulfe, we knew that I could very well trip one of the protections that Elizaveta or the witches had prepared. I had a couple of things I could do if I triggered them in such a way that my comrades would be otherwise unaware of it.

But the crow’s voice would carry well enough for the vampire to hear. Now they would try to sneak into Elizaveta’s territory the way I had just done, if they could. Zee’s glamour was, he assured us, quite up to hiding their presence unless the witches looked for magic.

I waited for someone, anyone, to hunt for me.

Instead, there was a pop, more of a pressure release than an actual noise. The fire got louder and I heard, for the first time, the witches’ voices quite clearly. Another ward had gone down, somewhere between me and the porch.

“Did you hear that, Elizaveta, darlin’?” said Death in a sticky sweet voice. “You have a vermin problem in your garden?”

At the sound of her voice, my soul grew still, grew focused. For the first time since I’d walked into Uncle Mike’s, I wasn’t afraid.

For weeks, buried in the poor half-grown kitten’s head, I had let her hurt us, hurt others, because I was helpless to do anything else. I had had to bear mute witness to the foulness of her actions. Tonight we were going to stop her.

The skin on my muzzle wrinkled and I had to fight back a growl.

“What was that?” asked Magda, the zombie witch, just as the crow sounded off again. She wasn’t talking about any sound I’d made—she was talking about the crow-thing, because I hadn’t made any noise.

I could feel the animated crow’s attention brush by me, but I was out of its area of perception now. It settled back into an inanimate object with a mutter of indignation and a ruffle of its feathers. This wasn’t a zombie; there was no semblance of life, no smell of wrongness. It was merely a simulacrum designed to warn intruders off. Elizaveta’s work—its voice had sounded like the old witch trying to mimic what a crow might sound like, assuming the crow was Russian, and it smelled like Elizaveta’s magic.

Magda made no effort to be quiet or unobtrusive when she came to check it out. She was using her cell phone as a flashlight, but I wasn’t worried.

A coyote’s fur is every color and blends very well into the shadows. In broad daylight the witch would have had trouble finding me where I lay under the vines. At night, as long as I kept my eyes closed so the light didn’t catch the reflection, I was virtually invisible.

Magda marched into the garden as if she owned it. When both feet were in the worked soil, the crow came to life again.

“Hardesty witch,” it said in a soft raspy voice. “You don’t belong here. You should go before you meet your doom.”

“And who are you to say so?” the witch demanded.

But the crow wasn’t really talking to her. “Witch, witch, witch,” it cried. “Elizaveta, there is a witch in our garden. Witch, witch, witch.”

“It’s just an animation,” the zombie witch called. She turned around and tramped back out of the garden. “The crow that sits atop the scarecrow is bespelled.”

“A scarecrow that is a crow,” said Death. Her voice was quiet. I couldn’t tell if she was speaking to Magda, who was striding back to the concrete square at the back of the house, or if she was speaking to the other people on the patio.

“It’s that scarecrow in the garden,” Death said. “That’s quite clever; I wonder if it works on skunks.”

“I don’t have a coyote for my collection,” Magda complained. “Why couldn’t it freeze the creature when it catches it? What’s the use in something that shrieks like that?”

“The whole point of it is to chase the creatures out of the garden,” Death said. “I’m sorry about the coyote; it will be miles away by now. If you really want a coyote so badly, we’ll set a live trap out tomorrow. Likely the creature will be back.”

“If she knows what’s good for her, she’ll be long gone,” said Elizaveta, making it clear that she knew who the coyote the crow had announced was. She sounded awful. Her voice was so hoarse that between the roughness and her Russian accent, I almost didn’t understand her. “Pity she didn’t come up through the lawn; she could have taken a nip out of you and not one of my little pretties would have warned you.” She coughed and spat.

Elizaveta, I thought, relief running through my bloodstream in a wash of hope. You haven’t thrown in with the bad guys in this.

But my relief came too soon.

“Adam,” said Magda, “be a dear. Go find that coyote for me, kill it, and bring it back.”

Death snorted. “Really? Don’t we have enough to do tonight that you need to make another of those things?”

I didn’t hear Magda’s reply. I was too busy putting as much distance between me and that porch in as short a time as I could manage.

Adam wouldn’t have a choice. I’d seen what that witch had made Elizaveta’s family do to each other, and to themselves. They were trained witches and they’d had no chance against Magda.

I was faster than most of the werewolves, I reassured myself. I put my head down and ran for all I was worth.

I didn’t make it a hundred yards before Adam’s teeth closed on the back of my neck and bit down. His momentum hit me sideways and we both tumbled to the ground and rolled. His teeth never left my neck.

They didn’t close down, either.

I lay limply on the ground, smelling my own blood in the night air. Adam crouched over the top of me. He growled, true anger in his voice, and I could feel the mate bond light up like a bonfire, sizzling flames burning through the muck of Magda’s compulsion with the force of Adam’s frustrated fury. Relief blossomed over me so strongly I don’t think I could have moved if I tried.

Our connection wasn’t comfortable, but I didn’t care. His rage rolled over me first and his wolf let me know that he was not impressed with my brains or obedience. How dare I risk this, that he might be forced to kill me?

But beneath the rage was terror, so I let him get by with the insults. Relief hit him a few seconds later, as it had me. He let me go and lay down next to me, shivering once. Excess adrenaline, I thought. I felt the buzz, too.

Wulfe appeared a dozen yards off and gave us both a disapproving look. “When I told you that I thought your touch might free him from her hold—given your immunity to their magic—I didn’t mean that you should touch your throat to his teeth. That generally doesn’t work as well.”

Adam rose, head lowered, ears pinned.

I shifted to human and touched his shoulder. “He’s on our side this time,” I told him. “I think.”

“Thanks for that,” Wulfe said with a smirk.

I looked at him. “Adam is free. What’s the plan now?”

“I don’t think the plan needs to change,” he said after a moment. “Adam should go back to the witches; they’ll think he failed to catch the coyote. As long as you do what she tells you, she’ll think you are still in thrall.”

“And if she figures it out?” I asked. “I don’t want to lose Adam to her again.”

His eyebrows rose. “Keep your bond open the way it is now. I don’t think she can get him as long as you do.” He looked at Adam. “It looks to me like all the players are out on the patio. I heard Elizaveta. Is the senator there, too?”

Adam nodded.

“Go back there and look like nothing is wrong,” Wulfe said. “I plan on making an entrance and then killing the witches. Mercy was going to see if she could manage to touch you—because I was pretty sure, given how mate bonds work, that would allow her to lend you her natural talent. Then she was going to go plant herself out of sight, where she would watch for an opportunity to get the senator out of harm’s way. And looky, now there are both of you to save the senator, while yours truly bears the brunt of the battle.”

He left out the way I was going to help kill the witches. Wulfe was not stupid. Bat-in-the-belfry bizarre, maybe. Psychopathic, certainly. But not stupid.

Adam thought about Wulfe’s plan. Then he made a chuffing sound and gave a pointed look all around us. I could smell them, too. He paused, because there was a zombie standing twenty feet away.

She could see us, but she didn’t do anything but watch. This one, I was afraid, was someone they had killed here. She was not well made; there was a rotting patch in the center of her right cheek through which I could see her teeth and tongue. She was about Jesse’s age.

“Wulfe spelled them to inattentiveness for now,” I told Adam. “It won’t hold if the witch calls them. But Zee and Tad are out here, too. Their part is to take care of the zombies. They already took care of the ogre.”

Adam tilted his head to me, and our mate bond rang with his warning.

“Something worse than the ogre?” I said. “Do you think that Zee will be overmatched?”

He considered that. I felt quite clearly that he wasn’t sure—but he decided to trust them.

A piercing whistle carried over the grounds. Adam’s muzzle wrinkled and he turned his head, eyes glittering.

“Easy there,” I said. “Do you think you can get the wolf to fake obedience?”

The wolf was the one who answered me. How could I doubt that he, who was such a patient hunter, could wait out the witches? He could lie in wait for days if necessary.

Adam had no ego—confidence, but no arrogance. The same was not true of his wolf.

I smiled and kissed his nose, wolf and man with the same caress, then let the change take me to my coyote form.

“I’ll go let the others know that we have Adam,” Wulfe said. “I’ll meet you by the garden.”

Back to plan A with improved odds. I felt pretty good about that.

Adam ran back to the witches and I trotted behind him, veering off when we got to the garden. I was careful not to alert the crow, tucking myself under another raspberry bush.

I listened to the witches greet Adam on his return. They came to the conclusion we had expected from them. Then they resumed whatever they were doing that sounded like something wet hitting skin. Sometimes there were hissing sounds, and that was when I smelled burnt flesh.

I caught the scent of something else from that direction—a zombie. The sense of wrongness from this one made me feel vaguely ill, just from the awareness that it was present. As careful as I was to examine the scent, I couldn’t put a familiar name to the kind of creature it was. It smelled almost fae, but not. Like fire magic, I thought. The hot, bitter scent of Zee’s iron-kissed magic was something akin to it, too.

I had waited for maybe fifteen minutes before I decided I needed to see what awaited me on that porch.

I tensed to rise to my feet, when Wulfe’s hand came down on my back. I couldn’t scent him or see him, but I knew who it was. I don’t know how I knew . . . That wasn’t quite true. I didn’t want to understand how I knew it was Wulfe.

I see ghosts. But I know when a vampire is about, too. My kind used to hunt vampires when they first came to this country. It’s why there aren’t very many of us—the vampires were better hunters, and there were more of them.

But I knew it was Wulfe, so I didn’t yip or do anything to draw the witches’ attention back to the garden. My clothes dropped in a pile on the ground next to me, along with my gun and my cutlass.

“Don’t try using the gun on the witches,” Wulfe breathed into my ear. “It won’t work.”

His voice in my ear was weird because I couldn’t sense him with my normal senses, just with that odd gift I used to find the dead. I didn’t like having that connection to him. I didn’t want any connection to Wulfe.

I got to my feet and slunk along the ground toward the huge patio where there would have been room for the whole pack to congregate. There was plenty of room for a few witches, a senator, a werewolf, and a . . . I stopped moving because I simply couldn’t make myself look away.

Curled up next to Adam, and nearly double his bulk, was . . . a something. It was covered in iridescent white scales about six inches across. I couldn’t see its head, only a single silver-and-purple-laced wing—the other presumably on the other side of the dragon.

I put my head back down, and with even more care than before, I moved from one spot of darkness to the next—but it didn’t matter. Everyone on that patio was focused on something that wasn’t a coyote ghosting in the dark—or a freaking dragon zombie. I could feel their focus with the same hunter’s instinct that had kicked in when Elizaveta’s crow had detected me. While I was moving, all I cared about—aside from the dragon—was that no one was looking for me.

I didn’t look directly at the occupants of the patio until I’d come around to where the firepit wasn’t between me and them. Then I took it all in with a single encompassing look, before I let my gaze fall to the side.

I wasn’t the only hunter present. I didn’t know how good witches are at feeling eyes on them from the darkness. But the dragon was there. I had trusted Wulfe’s zombie-sleep spell absolutely until the dragon. But everything I’d ever heard about dragons (aside from the fact that there were no such things) told me that magic wouldn’t work on them. But since someone had turned one into a zombie, I was pretty sure that some magic had to work on them. What I didn’t know was how well Wulfe’s magic would work on the one on the patio.

I heard a slithery noise and glanced back over at the patio. The dragon had rolled over and was looking straight at me.

As I looked into its purple eyes, I felt its connection to the witch and through her to all the dead she commanded. Their connection was like spider silk in comparison to the stout chains of our pack’s bonds . . . but it was less unlike than I was comfortable with. Later that might bother me.

Right then I was more concerned by how many of them there were. For a moment, caught in our shared gaze, I felt them all—a great weight of misery that stretched across Elizaveta’s property. There weren’t ten or twenty of them. There were dozens. Hundreds. Some made with great care, others newly made and rotting already.

But they were not my task.

I closed my eyes, breaking our tie. When I opened my eyes again, I watched the dragon, but I did not look at its eyes. I moved cautiously and its gaze did not follow me. I couldn’t tell if it was still caught up in Wulfe’s spell, or if it was just indifferent to me.

There were other participants that I needed to take note of. Senator Campbell was gagged and tied to a chair, Abbot on the ground beside him. I had forgotten about Tory Abbot, the senator’s aide. I watched him, but he had his head down and wasn’t moving.

The senator was hurt. I couldn’t see anything specific because the flickering firelight hid the tones of his skin and most of him was covered by his clothes. But I could see pain in the hunch of his body.

He saw me. But he didn’t know what I was, and he probably assumed that I was another of the zombie witch’s creations, her abominations. Maybe, if he’d been paying attention to the witches’ conversation, he thought I was just a coyote. A short, sharp scream made him turn his attention away from me, toward the star of tonight’s show.

Elizaveta. They had stripped her naked and hung her upside down from the basketball hoop pole next to the house. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but the skin on her face was bruised darkly enough that I could see it, even in the poor lighting. Her white hair hung down in an untidy mess. Her arms hung limply, a few inches off the ground, bound together with heavy manacles that looked as though they belonged in a medieval dungeon.

Magda had her hands in front of her mouth, like a child in a candy store who was trying to decide which flavor was best when all of them were wonderful. She swayed a little and hummed. I’d had my eyes shut when she’d joined me in the garden, so this was the first time tonight that I took in her appearance.

She wore a light-colored, silky top with a scoop neck that was just low enough to display the triple strand of pearls that lay over her collarbone. Her slacks were darker, but her midheel pumps were the same light color as her top. Pink, I thought. But it might have been lavender. She looked as though she were dressed for a garden party fund-raiser for a high-powered politician. Or posing for a society article in a magazine, maybe titled “What the Well-Put-Together Witch Wears to an Outdoor Torture Session This Year.”

In contrast, Death looked like she was dressed for a jewelry heist. She was encased head to toe in black. But this was nothing new. The whole time I’d been with that poor cat in her laboratory, I’d never seen her in any color but black. Tonight she had on a long-sleeved, high-neck tunic top, black jeans, and silver-laced black boots that matched the ones the poppet had worn. The whip in her hand was black and she used it on Elizaveta.

Elizaveta was an old woman, in her early seventies, I thought. She was in good shape for a woman of her age—there were muscles under the thinning, slacking skin. But her age added to the indignity and horror of what they were doing to her.

Unlike the senator, Elizaveta’s skin, pale and exposed, displayed the damage they’d been doing. I hated it that somewhere in my head I could look at the welts, burns, and bruises on a naked old woman and think, They’ve been taking it easy on her tonight. And they haven’t had her up there too long. Because I knew what it looked like when the witches were really working someone over.

“Again,” said Magda. “Please, Ishtar, please. That felt like . . . better than the last witch, better than all the witches here. That felt like—”

“Power,” said Death. She hit Elizaveta again and both witches shivered with the aftereffects.

I could think of her as Death because the alternative was Ishtar—essentially calling her a goddess, which I would not do. I had never heard her real name, though I had the impression that she hated it.

“I could do this all night, Elizaveta,” crooned Death, working up a rhythm with her whip. “You probably know exactly how wonderful this feels—yes, I had some lovely talks with your people. I almost kept one or two, but in the end decided I could use the power boost more. You have that much of a reputation, which should please you.”

She paused, surveying her work. There was a certain satisfaction in her body language. She took pride, I remembered, in the evenness of her lash work.

“I could break you, Elizaveta,” she crooned. “I could destroy your flesh and drink down your power.”

Magda squeezed herself and shivered. “I like it when you do that, Ishtar. Yummy.”

Death gave her a sympathetic smile. “I know, sweetheart. But I was given a task.” She started swinging again. This time there was no rhythm in it, no way to plan for the sting.

I knew how that felt.

“I could beat you to death,” she said. “We will drink your power and your pain, and my coven would find that acceptable. Particularly when you have given us such interesting toys and spells to take home. I bet you didn’t know that your grandson knew where you kept the family spellbook, did you? Stupid of you to leave him alive so long. He died knowing that he’d gotten his revenge.”

Robert, I thought, and had an instant, unbidden memory of his featureless, scarred face.

Elizaveta was beginning to pant, though it was more from emotion than from exhaustion. “Or you can surrender. We have ten bloodlines in our coven. Yours would be the eleventh. So close to a full coven. You’ve felt our power as a victim. Wouldn’t you love to feel it as one of us? I offer you power you could only dream about without us.”

“I am Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya, of house Kikimora. I can trace my bloodline a thousand years. Never would I join your ragtag band of mutts and rejects. I know who you are, Patience Ramsey. There is no house Ramsey. You do not know from where your witchblood comes. It was present in neither your mother’s nor in her husband’s lineage. Calling yourself Death does not make you a great witch, does not make legitimate your bloodline.”

She didn’t get it all out at once. But she did pull it off without screams or grunts, and I wasn’t sure that I would have managed it if I’d been in her place. By the end of Elizaveta’s little speech, Death—Patience—was trying her best to beat Elizaveta into silence.

I wasn’t just waiting around while the witches and Elizaveta had their chat. I used the fire and their preoccupation to slide all the way around the outer edge of the patio. It was really dark tonight; the moon was a bare sliver and there was a storm in the air that was covering the stars. If anyone had been looking, they would have seen me easily. But Elizaveta was giving them enough of a show that no one thought to look.

Except for Adam, who pinned his ears at me. And the dead dragon, which had turned its head in my direction.

I pinned my ears back at Adam. I was good at slinking unseen in plain sight. It was what coyotes do. And I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t have drawn the attention of the witches if I jumped up and ran around Adam singing “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.” They were enjoying themselves so much beating on Elizaveta, they were making this part much easier than it might have been.

As far as the dragon was concerned, I had decided to worry about it when it decided to worry about me.

I came, eventually, one careful pace at a time, to the shadows next to the house, wiggling (carefully) behind a box elder bush. Elizaveta kept her home very neat, and there were no unfortunate dried leaves or weeds to make noise. If we survived, I’d thank her for that. If all went according to plan from here on out, I’d spend the next stage of our battle here, out of the way.

When all hell broke loose, I’d run for my cutlass—especially since I knew that there were a lot of zombies, a lot more than any of us had planned on.

Adam was watching me—and so was the dragon. I wrinkled my nose and showed them both my teeth. I was trying to hide. I couldn’t do it if they both were determined to make sure the witches figured out there was something in the bushes.

Look away, I told Adam via our bond.

Adam and the dragon turned their attention to the outer darkness, away from Elizaveta’s corner of hell, and away from me. I had the odd thought—I expected a dragon, if I ever met one, to be bigger.

I sighed, put my muzzle on my paws, and settled in to wait. It was Wulfe’s show now.

I didn’t have to wait long.

Like me, he took advantage of the distraction Elizaveta provided. He stepped onto the concrete without fanfare, and no one—except Campbell, Adam, and . . . Elizaveta—noticed him do it. He just walked up to Death, to Patience, and grabbed her arm midswing.

She jerked, then fought—but he was a vampire. He ignored her and waved a careless hand. The manacles on Elizaveta’s ankles and wrists dropped to the ground. Somehow he let go of Death’s arm and caught Elizaveta before she hit the ground, too.

I had the uncomfortable thought that he might be faster than most of the werewolves. Maybe faster than me. I counted on my speed to stay safe. I didn’t like it that Wulfe was so quick. I would remember that.

He set Elizaveta down on one of the chairs scattered carelessly around the patio, picking one that was several paces outside the action. He took his time, making sure that she was as comfortable as possible—almost as if he were inviting the witches to attack him while they thought he was distracted.

They didn’t take him up on it. Patience, rubbing her wrist, had run across the patio until she stood shoulder to shoulder with Magda, where they could touch.

If I’d been Wulfe, I would have been interested in keeping them farther apart.

“Who are you?” Patience asked, her tones wary.

I felt a subtle wash of foul magic.

“Wizard,” said Magda. “The Wizard—whatever that means. Wolf and Wizard.” Her face twisted unhappily. “He’s not a wolf. I don’t know why I said that.”

“You can call me Wulfe if you want to,” said Wulfe with a smile. “Or you can call me Wizard—but not many do that last to my face.”

I wondered if he felt the slow build of magic that Death, that Patience, was working. But I needn’t have worried.

Wulfe laughed, that horrible boneless laugh, then made a gesture that ended palm out. He used the hand Stefan had cut off again. I wondered if Stefan had cut that one off for a reason.

Patience crumpled around her center, not quite losing her footing, but it looked like a near thing. She screamed, partly out of pain, but I’d wager some of it was anger, too.

“You’re a wizard,” said Magda indignantly. She reached out to grip Patience’s hand. “You used wizard magic to free Elizaveta. You can’t be a witch, too.”

As soon as she touched the other witch, that one quit screaming. I thought that Wulfe should maybe keep them from touching each other. Instead, Wulfe said, “No?”

He made another gesture with that hand. Patience put a hand, palm up, between them, and this time she didn’t scream. But the firelight revealed sweat on her forehead. The tendons of her neck were tense, as if she were making a great effort.

“Babies, help Mama,” crooned Magda. The dragon uncurled and lunged—but so did Adam. He grabbed the dragon by the muzzle and held on.

Cutlass. Adam’s need reached through our bond.

I bolted out from under the box elder and ran for the garden with every ounce of speed I could muster. I’m pretty sure that the only one who noticed me was Elizaveta, because I ran right in front of her—and because that witch was pretty scarily observant.

A step from the cutlass, I changed back to human. I grabbed the blade and brought it across the throat of the boy zombie I’d passed on my way to the house. I hadn’t seen him, just knew that he was running for me. The sharp silver blade snicked through his neck and kept moving as the boy fell.

I felt the force that animated the body break, as if I’d cut through more than flesh and bone. I felt again the likeness to the pack bond—a bare trickle compared to the river of the pack, but both were running water. For a moment, something else lingered where the zombie had fallen. Not a ghost, not a soul, but something tragic and broken. I was pretty sure it was fading, but I couldn’t wait around to find out—Adam was fighting a zombie dragon.

I ran.

No one on my side had died yet. Adam was still wrestling with the zombie. His battle was aided by the fact that the zombie was mostly just trying to get to the witches, and fighting Adam only because he was in the way.

Whatever Wulfe was doing—and it made breathing while I was running like breathing underwater—it kept the witches occupied. Magda had had no chance to change her orders to the dragon. I felt like I was overlooking something, but I’d worry about it sometime when Adam wasn’t fighting a dragon zombie.

I relied on the bonds between us—mate bond and pack bond—to time my move. I did not slacken my speed as I passed the embattled dragon.

I put my other hand, the one that was not holding the cutlass, on Adam’s shoulder. He was braced for it so my weight didn’t disturb his balance as I vaulted up and over, out of the way of the half-hearted swipe of wing. Instead, that strike turned a sturdy wooden table into kindling.

Adam twisted his weight suddenly and the dragon’s head twisted, too. He released the dragon’s muzzle as I slid the cutlass into the soft flesh under the dragon’s jaw, up through its snout. Locking the jaws shut with the sword.

I jumped up as the dragon writhed and Adam knocked the creature away from me. The battle was a long way from over, but Adam could fight now, instead of just trying to keep its mouth safely closed. Triumphantly, I dashed across the patio to stop a handbreadth from Elizaveta. Half laughing in exhilaration, I briefly caught Elizaveta’s gaze, but her attention slid past me and over my shoulder. The firelight brightened on her face for an instant and I saw her pupils flare.

“She’s called them all,” she said.

I whirled.

Of course, I thought, the boy zombie I’d killed was no longer settled under Wulfe’s thrall. That meant they had been called. All of them, a lot more than a hundred.

I could feel them stirring beneath the tug of Magda’s words. Their twisted unnatural state was a sadness that dragged at my heart.

They were running at us—and Elizaveta called out something that sounded like “passion fruit” but equally well could have been something in Russian. Elizaveta could speak English with the precision of a BBC newscaster. But today, her Russian accent was full bore, and that meant I was more than usually likely to misunderstand what she said.

Magic rippled, leaving the air taut with something that felt to my overheated senses like anticipation. A zombie, the first of dozens, made it to the edge of the concrete and ran into an invisible barrier, as did the teeming mass of zombies that followed it. Adam and the dragon had not confined their battle royal to the patio. When Elizaveta had brought up her spell, a warding that followed the edge of the concrete, both Adam and the dragon were on the other side of that barrier.

“They cannot come through my magic,” Elizaveta told me.

Adam’s back hit the barrier hard, and he used the semi-elastic surface to launch a leap that ended with him atop the dragon, which still had the cutlass stuck through its jaws.

Elizaveta saw what I was watching. “Adam should be able to take care of himself,” she said confidently. “He is a splendid beast.”

“Elizaveta,” I said, whispering furiously, “there are a lot of zombies out there.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “You can do something about that, Coyote’s daughter. And I do not know why you are waiting. My barrier will not stop you.”

“What—” I started to ask her, but I was interrupted by a commotion followed by the crack of wood.

I looked up to see the senator’s chair sliding along the concrete on its side. I couldn’t immediately see a cause for it—so it was probably something Wulfe had done. When it had gone over, it’d knocked over a small table where the witches had kept an array of sharp objects.

I jogged over, one eye on Wulfe and the witches. To my shame, Senator Campbell had not been a priority for me, though he was the most vulnerable of us. It was past time to get the senator free of his bonds so at least he could run. Not that running would help him escape the zombies, but maybe he could get out of the way of stray blows not directed at him.

Rather than try to pull the chair upright, I just used a short-bladed knife that had been among the witches’ scattered implements. It had no trouble slicing through the ropes Campbell had been tied to the chair with. Once he was freed, I helped the senator lurch to his feet.

With a hand under his elbow, I urged him to the relative safety of the space near Elizaveta. She might even be inclined to help keep him alive. I gave him the knife and he went to work on his gag. As I turned to see what the witches were doing, I got a whiff of fresh blood—a lot of it. We’d left a blood trail behind us. The senator’s pant leg was wet with it—and someone had chewed a hole in his leg.

I reviewed that first flash of a glance I’d taken upon my arrival to the tableau on the patio. Abbot had been curled around Senator Campbell’s leg. He’d evidently been chewing. I didn’t know if he’d been doing it because he was a witch and powering himself up with the senator’s pain. Or if he was a zombie now. He hadn’t smelled like a witch when I’d met him before—but male witches aren’t as powerful as the females. It was possible that Magda’s scent had masked his.

I looked for Abbot, but I didn’t see him. Maybe he’d ended up on the outside of Elizaveta’s circle.

I scanned the darkness, but all I could see were the zombies crowded thickly around us. They were all focused on coming to Magda’s aid. As Wulfe had said, the majority of them were humans, but I saw a border collie and a pair of cats.

I glanced over at the witches and was caught in the beauty of their battle. The stench of black magic was so thick that it seemed almost unconnected with the fight between Wulfe and the witches.

I could not see the magic, just felt it on my skin and in my flesh. Some was so vile that I felt as if I would never be able to wash it from my body. Some of it was sharp and sparkly, and it felt the way fireflies look. But that, too, seemed unconnected to their combat. Impossible that such foulness could be a part of the beauty of their dance. When the fight had begun, it had been a thing of gestures, of hands and fingers. Deep into their battle, they moved as if they were doing kata—quick and graceful movements that used their whole bodies.

Wulfe’s body had the fluid grace of one of the big cats. Patience’s dance consisted of small, efficient movements—precision was her guiding force. Magda—the one I’d have expected grace from—moved instead with jerks and stomps. There was power in her dance, but not elegance.

After a few seconds I began to see the flow of power. I couldn’t see the magic that passed between them, but I could infer the path from the connections between the three of them.

I’d seen crime scenes on TV shows where yarn was strung to trace lines of bullet trajectories. If there were enough bullets fired, the string pattern was oddly beautiful, like a freshman art project. The witches’ combat reminded me of that.

One of the zombies was big enough it caught my eye and I turned to see that the dragon zombie—a huge wound across its face beginning to scab over as I watched—was dragging its claws against the invisible wall of Elizaveta’s working. The cutlass was gone.

Adam’s life was bright and whole on the other side of our bond. I could feel the wild joy of battle shiver into my blood. Adam was fine.

“Mercy,” Elizaveta said. “You can free them—”

“Vampire,” called Magda triumphantly over the top of Elizaveta’s voice. “He’s a vampire, Ishtar.”

“Abbot,” purred Death. I mean Patience. Patience is not nearly as scary as Death, right?

The dragon zombie turned its attack to the ground, digging in the dirt at the base of the concrete. Concrete—the kind poured for patios—would not have slowed down a werewolf, and it didn’t slow down the dragon, either. For a zombie, this one was smart.

This is wrong, said Coyote’s voice in my head, and he didn’t mean the way the dragon was burrowing into our zombie-free zone.

There were no words for how beautiful the dragon was—even if it was smaller than I’d expected a dragon to be. The bones of its face were covered by minute scales, each glittering like a gem in the light of the fire. A thousand points of light that blossomed into an iridescent blanket. Delicate, impossibly fragile-looking membranous wings were held out to balance the dragon as it dug. Great purple eyes were fixed on its goal.

I could only imagine what it would have looked like if it had been alive.

This zombie was an abomination.

Wrong.

I raised my hand toward her. Maybe it was by chance, or maybe she had felt me watching her, but she raised her eyes to mine. Hers, not its. There was something looking at me from inside those eyes. Tears gathered in my own eyes at the terrible evil of what had been done to her.

Wood scraped near me and I looked over at the table the dragon had smashed. Abbot crawled out of the shelter he’d found in the broken boards. He was wearing clothing that had once been suitable for meeting the president, but I didn’t think there was a dry cleaner in the world who could repair it now. There was blood smeared around his mouth and down the front of his shirt and pants.

“Vampire,” he said.

And he gathered power, a black mass of crafting. Witch, I thought, not zombie. He strode forward as if he hadn’t just been hiding under a pile of wood, as if he hadn’t gnawed into the senator’s leg when Campbell was tied and couldn’t defend himself. He walked like a warrior wading into a familiar battlefield.

“Wulfe!” I screamed.

Wulfe was too busy with the witches to pay attention. I didn’t know what to do. Wulfe had made it quite clear that once he’d engaged in battle, I was to stay away.

Abbot pulled a knife from a pocket, flicked it open, and cut himself. Then in a gesture that reminded me of Sherwood’s motion earlier tonight, he flung his own blood at Wulfe’s back. I was too far away and it was too dark—the firelight was tricky, full of strong light and shadows—to see if it hit Wulfe.

But it must have. Because when Abbot took all the power he’d gathered and shoved it into his voice, saying, “Vampire,” Wulfe froze.

The two witches stopped their dance midmove. I don’t know what Magda’s face looked like, because I was watching the smile bloom on Patience’s face. Death’s face. Because patience is a virtue and there was nothing good about the expression on her face.

“Oh, vampire,” Magda said. “We haven’t had a vampire like you to play with in a long time. Ours used to be fun, but now she only curls up in a corner and cries.”

And just at that moment, the dragon’s claws broke through the concrete and my attention was forced to a more immediate problem. The zombie ripped a two-foot-square chunk away from the patio and hauled it down.

For a moment I could see a hole, and then it was filled with dragon. She’d misjudged; there wasn’t enough room for her to squeeze through. But she’d already proven that Elizaveta’s circle only went down to the ground, and that the ground and concrete were no match for her. It would only take a moment for her to widen the hole.

I don’t know why I didn’t run screaming. But Coyote’s voice still rang in my head. Also, after all the sadness I felt in seeing this thing that had once been a dragon, there was no room inside me for anything else—not even healthy emotions like terror or self-preservation.

Touch is important in magic.

I reached down and put my hand on her forehead. She couldn’t quite get her shoulders and forelimbs through, but all she would have had to do was twist her head and she could have taken off my arm at the elbow.

A bond lit up between us, bright and clean, a connection both like and unlike the kinds of bonds I was more familiar with. This wasn’t pack magic. This was a thing of Coyote, who was the spirit of free agency. Of choice, for good and ill. Of death and dying.

“Go,” I told the dragon. I put power into my voice, power that I’d learned from Adam, but I didn’t need to borrow from my mate for this. This power came from my father. I whispered, because this was not a power that needed volume. “Go. Be at peace.”

“No!” It was Magda’s voice, I think. “Stop her!” The dragon went limp beneath my fingers. Her body shrank as if the flesh were nothing without the terrible magic that kept it animate. She no longer filled the hole completely; soon other zombies would break through the opening she had made.

It didn’t take long. Something ripped the dragon’s desiccating body away and a woman began to slither through. She was smaller than the dragon—there was plenty of room for her.

But I was still caught in that odd headspace where I wasn’t afraid of the zombies—I was sad for them. I reached out, but this time I didn’t try to touch her skin. This time I reached out for the threads of power that bound this zombie to the witch whose creature she was.

Instead of grasping only her threads, my fingers closed on dozens of strings. They weren’t comfortable to hold, those bonds, too full of that terrible wrongness.

My grip didn’t feel firm enough, so I twisted my hands, winding those bonds around my forearms until they were made fast. Then I jerked, giving a tremendous pull that used my whole body.

When all of those bonds were straining and I was pulling with all of my weight, I took a breath. I said softly, with utter conviction, “Go. Be at peace.”

It felt so right. I felt as if I were full of light and joy. Of rightness—or at least the opposite of wrongness. I felt clean. And a wide swath of the zombies who had been trying to get onto the patio dropped as if poleaxed.

But there were more zombies. A lot more. I reached out and this time the bonds came eagerly to my hands, as if they were metal and I held a magnet. I took them, and spinning round and round, wrapped my whole body with them. Even as I did so, I felt a few of those threads break in bright, happy sparks—freedom found before I could gift them with it.

Dimly, I heard Tory Abbot say, “Wulfe, stop her.” But I was too caught up in the moment to pay much attention to his words.

The bonds let me watch Tad, clad in blackness that made him hard to see, a huge axe in his hands. I felt it hit the zombie whose bonds I held—and my awareness of Tad was gone as the zombie’s thread dissolved into fireworks followed by nothingness. If I had wanted to, I felt that I could have tracked Tad from zombie to zombie as he brought them to the final stillness and released the wrongness of their existence.

Zee’s path through my zombie-leashes was swifter than his son’s. I felt him move like a wave of destruction, his sword singing in joy, and they released zombie after zombie to wherever they would go after their long subjugation.

Adam. Oh, Adam was beautiful in his wrath. He danced with the dead and they fell before him like so many petals in the wind. I was tempted to stop and just watch him.

But I had a job to do.

I think I was a little power drunk. And maybe a bit dizzy.

I raised my hands to the skies and twirled like a top, a naked top. I probably looked a fool. But there was no room for self-analysis in me at that moment. I turned and turned and gathered them all, all the shiny, wispy threads of spider silk and all the zombies. Every last one, every creature bound unwillingly to unnatural life, I held them in my hands, wrapped around my body.

They would have done my bidding more eagerly than they had done the witch’s. I knew it, knew I held the power of an unstoppable army in my grasp. They could kill the witches, destroy any threat to me, to my pack, to the people I held dear. I held power in my hands such that had never been available to me before.

But in that moment in time, there was only one thing I wanted from them, one necessity that drove me.

I gave them my order.

“Go,” I whispered. “Be at peace.”

Wulfe’s hand closed ungently on my upper arm at the moment I spoke those words.

Two hundred fourteen . . . thirteen (as one fell beneath Adam’s fangs) sparks left their rotting corpses and flew away. Out in the darkness, the corpses dropped, abandoned puppets. Some of them I saw with my eyes; others I just felt.

Wulfe dropped, too, and lay unmoving at my feet.

I sat down abruptly beside him. I felt empty and aching, as though I’d been trampled by a herd of horses. Twice. The euphoria of the moment before was gone, vanished as quickly as it had come.

I didn’t know if I’d killed Wulfe when I released the zombies. Rekilled him. Removed him from his vampiric existence. I couldn’t decide how I felt about that.

“Passion fruit,” said Elizaveta, standing up abruptly from the chair Wulfe had tucked her into. I was almost sure the word really was “passion fruit” this time.

I felt the flutter as her circle fell and the patio was once more open to the night. It was a little easier to see the dead covering the ground, thicker near the patio, but the whole of the yard and beyond was full of bodies. A lot of those were human-zombie bodies.

With the zombies all deanimated, it was easy to pick out Adam, Tad, and Zee—they were the only ones left standing. Tad and Zee were turning in a wary circle, looking for a foe. Adam loped in my direction.

Elizaveta patted my head as she passed me. “Good,” she told me. “Now it is my turn.”

She walked slowly—no doubt hampered by the damage the witches had inflicted on her—but each step was easy and firm. She walked as if she owned the ground under her feet.

The three witches—Death, Magda, and Abbot—were staring around them, momentarily overwhelmed by the sudden destruction of their army. There was blood dripping from Magda’s nose and the ear nearest me.

“Stupid,” Elizaveta said in satisfied tones.

Death recovered first. She scowled and opened her mouth.

But before Death could say anything, Elizaveta raised her hand palm up and said, “Tory Abbot, Patience Ramsey, Magda Fischer. Die.”

I felt it again, that moment, that instant when everything stopped. To me it felt like a club of darkness that, even not directed at me, tried to freeze the blood in my body.

“Die,” said Elizaveta again.

They obeyed Elizaveta, the three Hardesty witches, because there was no possibility for them to do anything else.

They died so fast that there was not even an instant for shock or disbelief. They just dropped dead.

I’d watched Patience use that spell to kill every living thing in Elizaveta’s house except for a cat. But Death had not lit up like a blowtorch when she consumed their lives. Elizaveta did. I had felt the magic Patience had harvested from dozens in that house the night Elizaveta’s family died. Immortal witches, Coyote had told me. And I’d known then where Death had gotten her immortality.

But I knew for a certainty that that houseful of life had supplied her with not a tithe of what Elizaveta farmed from the three witches. I felt the filthy magic wash into her and fill her as if she were an empty vessel beneath a water spout. Power lit her from within until I had to bring my arm up and shield my eyes.

My bones ached with the wrongness of that magic. But eventually the tide of filthy black magic faded. I brought my arm down so that I could see.

The first thing I saw wasn’t Elizaveta, though. While I hadn’t been watching, Adam had shifted all the way back to human. He stood, naked, every muscle in his body clenched like it hurt. His eyes were shut and the muscle in his cheek was twitching. As I watched, he drew in a breath and started to relax.

Elizaveta stood, her hand on his shoulder, beaming at him as if she had done him a favor—instead of pulling him through a full change, wolf to man, in what looked to have been an incredibly painful fashion.

As I watched, she stepped away from him and walked to the bodies of her victims. She knelt beside them and began frisking them like a professional thief. I rolled to my feet and staggered forward.

Elizaveta was on our side, I reminded myself. There was no reason for the anxious terror that filled me at the sight of Elizaveta’s tangled white hair darkening to sable, of her slack and bruised dermis being replaced by firm, milky skin without a wrinkle or an age spot.

“I told you they were foolish,” Elizaveta said as she set rings, necklaces, and small bits and pieces of cloth, clay, and bone aside. They sparked as she touched them, the magic she was still absorbing bringing them to life. A life that left them as soon as she set them aside.

“Foolish?” Adam said—because of course it was Adam she was speaking to.

She looked up at him and the fickle firelight caught her face and bathed her in a light that was illuminating rather than blinding. The old witch no longer looked like the well-preserved seventy-year-old woman she had been. I’d always thought she would have been stunning when she was young. Beautiful. I was wrong. Her features were still too strong for that. Her nose was still hawkish and her jaw was too long.

But I imagined that if Helen of Troy had been a real person, she might have looked like Elizaveta Arkadyevna. Elizaveta’s face could have launched a thousand ships.

She looked away from my mate and down at herself, at skin that was smooth and taut over muscles that would have done credit to a werewolf. She stretched her long and graceful fingers, hands that belonged to a woman in her twenties.

“She used her death-bringing spell in my home,” Elizaveta said, giving Abbot’s body one last pat-down, taking an amulet out of his pocket.

“I have been looking for that spell ever since I first heard rumors of it—when I was as young as I look right now. And they brought it right to me.” Elizaveta stood up.

She nudged Patience with her toe. “Foolish to work secret magic in another witch’s stronghold.” She gave Adam a flirtatious smile. “I improved it a bit.”

He held out his hand. She put her hand in his and he kissed it.

“Is this what it feels like to be a werewolf?” she asked him. “Nothing hurts.”

She closed her fingers over his; a beautiful smile lit her face.

“Adam,” she said. “I have wanted to do this for years.”

She stepped into his space, leaned her beautiful, strong, young, and naked body against his. She was just an inch or two taller than he was, but it didn’t matter. Adam was so much wider, more solid, that she looked like a fairy princess to his warrior.

They were beautiful.

She tilted her face to facilitate her kiss, revealing Adam’s face to me. Just as her lips touched his, Adam’s eyes met mine.

I couldn’t read what I saw there. Not then.

Then he closed his eyes. He kissed her. One of his arms wrapped around her waist. The other one slid down, through her long silky hair, and cupped the back of her head.

He snapped her neck, stepping back so that her body hit the concrete hard instead of cushioning her fall. It didn’t matter to her; she was dead. But it said a lot about how Adam felt about her.

He looked at me and waited for my judgment.

I knew that he had liked her. I knew that he thought of her as family, had enjoyed the verbal sparring matches they had sometimes engaged in. Enjoyed dusting off his mother’s Russian and flirting with an old woman.

“This is our territory,” I said, giving him the words he needed. “We don’t allow black magic in our territory.”

He closed his eyes and swallowed.

“That’s right,” he said. When I folded him in my arms, he lifted me against him and buried his face against my neck.

We held each other, surrounded by the dead.