Storm Cursed

2

Gruesome as it was, I had to admit the head was easier to pack into the Jetta than a whole body would have been, especially since there was no upholstery or carpet in the space where (hopefully) someday a backseat would reside.

I wrapped the head in the blue tarp that I’d been using to keep the interior of the Jetta dry (the seal on one of the windows and the trunk was gone). I’d throw the tarp away as soon as I got rid of the head. Tarps are cheap.

I managed to handle the gruesome object without dousing myself in blood. My clothing had actually fared pretty well under the circumstances. There was a rip in the shoulder of my shirt—and it was possible that had happened in the fight and not when I’d changed to coyote. But my underpants were undamaged, except for the dirt I’d had to shake out. I’d even found both of my socks and shoes.

With the head stowed away, I settled into the driver’s seat of the Jetta and mentally crossed my fingers. When it started on the first try, I was a bit surprised.

I muttered, “So far, so good.” I tend to talk to cars—not only when I drive them, but when I work on them. I don’t know that it helps, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

Before I could put the car in gear, the passenger door opened and Mary Jo plopped into the seat beside me.

“Who do you suppose he was talking about?” Mary Jo said as she looked around for the seat belt. She tipped her head back to show she meant the dead goblin when she said “he” rather than any of the other choices.

“There isn’t a seat belt on the passenger side yet,” I told her. “And which of them was talking about who? And don’t you have your own car to drive?”

She quit fussing and settled in. “Ben’s going to arrange for someone to pick it up. Ben’s allergic to law enforcement, so I got elected to accompany you. And as far as the ‘which of them was talking about who’ . . . first, it should be ‘about whom.’ Second, didn’t you notice that the goblin was nattering on about someone, a ‘she’ who told him he should come here? That we’d give him protection from the humans?”

“Oh, those whos,” I said. Let Mary Jo try to figure out if it should be those “whoms” or “whos”—though for the record, I was pretty sure I was right this time. “I’d ask our passenger, but he’s not talking.”

I thought about the rest of what she’d said—and the way she’d settled into my car as if she had no intention of getting back out.

I said, “I don’t need company. Thank you for the thought, but, as I said, there is no seat belt for your seat yet. I would rather not drive up to the sheriff’s office with someone sitting illegally in my car that—if examined by a stickler—might not be legal to drive.”

I must not have gotten quite the right amount of unfelt gratitude in my voice because she laughed. “Look. Adam will not be happy if we let you go by yourself.”

She brought out the Alpha card, and we both knew she was right. If I made her get out—and I wasn’t sure I could do that—I could very well be getting her into trouble.

But it was my job to protect the pack, not theirs to protect me. “I thought you were still flying under the radar about being a werewolf,” I said. “Won’t some of the people at the sheriff’s know you in your firefighting identity?”

Just because some of the werewolves were out didn’t mean that all of them were. For instance, Auriele aka Lady Mockingbird was a teacher, and we weren’t sure just how well the school district would take knowing she changed into a werewolf. Her husband, Darryl, Adam’s second, had been outed when fighting that troll on the Cable Bridge. He worked for a think tank with all sorts of government secrets for which he needed clearance. He’d run into a few bumps on that—though he’d gotten through.

Mary Jo shrugged. “I told my department and everyone in it after the troll incident.” Her body language was casual, but I could smell her contentment. “They took it better than I expected, actually.” She grinned a little self-consciously, a more open expression than any I’d seen from her since Adam and I had become a committed couple. “They quit giving me crap about being a weak woman. Now they’re trying to figure out just how quick and strong I am.”

Hazing? I wondered. But she didn’t seem unhappy about it so I let it go.

“Okay,” I told her. “Just remember, if we get pulled over because you don’t have a seat belt on, you are an adult and so the ticket belongs to you.”

She snorted. “I think that’s only when there is a seat belt to wear.”

She might have been right. I guessed that if a police car pulled me over, they might be more concerned with the disembodied head than whether Mary Jo was wearing a seat belt. I’d given her an out, reminded her what she risked—that was all I was responsible for.

I put the Jetta in gear—the clutch was stiff so it took a little effort. We puttered off the field and onto the bumpy dirt road: a werewolf, a coyote shapeshifter, and a goblin’s head.

I called Tad. No Bluetooth in the Jetta so I had to break the law to do that, too. Seat belt and cell phone—in for a penny, in for a pound.

“Mercy?” he said, sounding groggy. “What’s up?”

“I’m delivering a goblin’s head to the sheriff’s office. I don’t think they’ll be worried about me getting out in time to make it to work this morning.”

Tad grunted. “Anyone I know?”

I had to stop and wait before turning onto a better class of graveled road because there was a line of cars speeding past. You know you’re in a hotbed of agriculture when there is a traffic jam at four in the morning on a gravel road. They were trying to beat the heat that was supposed to be over a hundred degrees by midafternoon.

“I don’t know who you know,” I told him grumpily. I hated being late to work. The traffic didn’t make me happier, either. “He killed a policeman and a child, and he’s dead now.”

Tad snorted. “Jeez. Grouchy much? No worries, Mercy. I can handle it until you get in. You need to hire someone else to answer phones, though, if you need me to keep twisting a wrench.”

“Let’s get through a couple of months first,” I told him. “I hate to hire someone if we’re not making enough to pay ourselves.”

“Optimist,” accused Tad, and then he disconnected.

Traffic finally allowed me to continue our journey. Eventually we made it to a paved road that was much less busy. I breathed a sigh of relief because the shocks on the car had not been a priority for me before now. “I wonder what he meant when he said he was the first of thirty.”

“Who?” Mary Jo asked.

I’d been talking to myself—which probably was rude, so I didn’t admit that to Mary Jo. Instead I tilted my head toward our backseat (if there had been a seat) passenger. “Him. He bragged about being the first of thirty. Maybe ‘a first of thirty.’”

“The goblins were soldiers, right? In the various fae wars. Maybe they divided themselves up into groups of thirty.”

She said it as if it were common knowledge. I’d never heard it before and I’d had a book written about the fae by the fae. I started to ask her about that, but she kept talking.

“Or,” she said, wiggling in her seat, “maybe there were once thirty tribes of goblins and he was chief. He’s dead now, so it hardly matters. Mercy, you need to do something about this seat. It sucks.”

I frowned at her. “This is a Wolfsburg Edition. That’s an original leather seat.”

“It’s broken,” she said. “It tilts to the outside. I’d be more interested in who sent him here.”

“She,” I muttered, wondering if I could fix the seat or if I was going to have to get a new one. It looked like it was pristine, but Mary Jo was the first person I’d had sit in it. Hopefully it was just a bad weld. “The goblin said ‘she.’”

“I don’t like it when troublesome fae get sent to our territory,” Mary Jo grumped, wiggling until her seat made a thump-thump sound. “It makes me wonder who else they may have sent.”

“And why,” I agreed. “If you keep moving that seat, it might give up altogether and you’ll be sitting with our other passenger in the back.” She snorted, but quit wiggling. Thoughtfully I continued, “At least it was a ‘she.’”

She lifted an eyebrow.

“That means it wasn’t Coyote. Anyone other than Coyote I can deal with.”

She hissed like a scalded cat—and I didn’t think she had even met Coyote. “You know better than to tempt the fates like that. There are thousands of things and people out there that are worse than Coyote.” No, she had never met Coyote. “Knock on wood,” she demanded.

I grinned, because she really sounded panicked. “Feeling superstitious, werewolf?”

She turned so that she could sneer at me—and her seat broke loose, tipping her abruptly toward the door. She smacked her head into the window.

“Looks like you took care of knocking on wood,” I observed serenely. “I don’t think it was that important, but hey . . .”

She growled at me.

I patted the cracked dashboard and murmured to the car, “I think we are going to be good friends.”

The tarp had been old, and apparently it had a few places that weren’t leakproof.

It might be a trick getting into the sheriff’s office with it dripping blood. The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office was located in the heart of downtown Pasco in the county courthouse complex, and even though it was still very early, there were a few people out and about.

I looked at the little building that served as the secure entrance into the complex and realized it was closed.

I don’t know why that thought was the nickel in the gumball machine that made my common sense start working. But it finally occurred to me, as I gripped the top of the Jetta’s door so I could lean down and examine the tarp a little more closely, that I might be in trouble.

I have never had difficulty understanding the rules of living as a human. Nor had I had difficulty understanding the rules the werewolves who had raised me lived by—or the supernatural community as a whole. Granted, I did a better job of living by human rules, but I’d been older when I started—and I didn’t have Bran Cornick, the überking of the werewolves, trying to shove the rules down my throat.

What I understood for the first time, contemplating that bloody tarp, was that I seldom had to deal with both sets of rules at the same time. It had made sense, by werewolf rules, that the renegade goblin should die. Even if we had apprehended him, I don’t think any jail would have held him for long. And what he would have done to the population of prisoners in the meantime didn’t bear thinking on.

There was no doubt of his guilt. He had confessed, eventually and sideways, to killing a child as well as killing the police officer. Justice had been unholy swift, maybe, but it had been his king who had carried out the sentence. All a little medieval, but that was the way of the fae and of werewolves.

It had made sense, from a werewolf perspective, to take the head back to the police because they had jurisdiction over the crime the goblin had committed. Werewolves were all about order and authority. Moreover, the goblin king, who was de facto responsible for the miscreant goblin because they were the same species, had told me to do it. He had the right and the authority to determine that since the goblin had sinned against the humans, the humans should have the evidence that justice had been served, to wit, the head.

Larry meant to use the dead goblin as a political gambit, a statement of power combined with a declaration that he was on the side of justice, if not the law. That he considered the murder of humans to be wrong. And all of that was well and good.

But now I was standing near the heart of human justice—the courthouse. And from that human perspective . . . I frowned at the bloody tarp. Nothing of what I’d done made sense from a human perspective. Killing someone was a crime, even if the one you killed deserved it.

I may not have killed the goblin—but . . . I wasn’t sure I could prove it. I’d bet a million bucks that Larry the goblin king would not be recognizable on the video feed from the barn. In fact, as I considered it, I was pretty sure that the cameras would have quit working the moment he was aware of them. It had been pretty dark about then—it was still pretty dark. If he had shown up at all, then he would have been little more than a shadowy figure.

Only the four of us—Larry, Ben, Mary Jo, and I—knew that it hadn’t been I who’d killed the goblin. No one could prove it was, either . . . but oddly I didn’t trust human justice as much as I trusted the werewolves. Justice is easier when the judge, jury, and executioner can tell if the accused tells a lie.

“Are you making friends with him?” growled Mary Jo from the sidewalk. “He’s probably not going to be a good conversationalist.”

“I’m trying to figure out how I end up at work this morning,” I told her. “Instead of in jail.”

Because I had done everything wrong. I should have called the sheriff’s office from the barn. I’d have liked to believe that the goblin king had magicked me into following orders. But I had just been caught up in what was right and proper on the magical side and forgotten that human law enforcement wasn’t going to think highly of this.

She grunted. Then she squinted at the head a moment herself.

“Well, damn,” she said in the voice of someone who has suddenly realized something. “Look what a stupid thing you did.”

I looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

She lifted her hands, palms up. “You’re the boss here, Mercy. I assumed you knew what you were doing.”

I gave her a look and she broke down and laughed.

“I know,” she said. “Me, too. He’s just got that kingly thing going. And maybe I was distracted trying to figure out if he is actually going to go cannibal or if he’s going to take the body back for some sort of ritual funeral or something. And . . . well, I guess I just don’t get fussed about dead people . . . dead anything, anymore. I forgot that our human counterparts aren’t going to feel the same way.”

She looked around and sighed. She pulled out her phone and pressed some numbers on it.

“What?” a groggy and grumpy voice said. Then, irritably, “I’m off today, Carter, not late again. Go screw yourself.”

“This is Mary Jo,” she told him. “I need your official help.”

There was a three-beat pause.

“Mary Jo,” he said, sounding much more awake—but his voice was raw. “We’re done, you said. No more. Well, done is done.” And he disconnected.

“Ex-boyfriend,” Mary Jo told me. “Renny’s a good guy, but he started to get too serious. I don’t do serious with the humans. Doesn’t seem fair.” She tried to sound hard and did a fair to middling job of it, so I guessed it had hurt her, too.

She pressed the numbers again.

“Go away,” he said.

“Official, Renny. I’m standing outside your place of work with Mercy Hauptman. We have a dead goblin’s head in the backseat of her car. We’d like to donate it to the coroner’s office through official channels. Since the head was made bodiless in Mesa, I kind of figured that might be up your alley.”

He disconnected.

Mary Jo gave her phone a look, started to press numbers again, but then her phone rang.

“Goblin head?” Renny said. “Did you say a goblin head?”

“I did,” she responded.

There was a long pause.

When he spoke again, his voice was all business. “If you are in the front parking lot, drive around the block to the back gate of the employee parking lot and wait for me. It’ll take me five to dress and another five to get there. I’m calling this in—so if you are screwing with me, I’ll see your supervisor.” And he clicked off without giving Mary Jo a chance to say anything.

“Give him a severed goblin head, and he forgets all about how mad and hurt he is.” There was a little tightness around her eyes that I tried not to see, because Mary Jo didn’t want me to see her pain. So instead I paid attention to the sarcasm in her voice when she said, “Obviously, it was true love on his part.”

Mary Jo’s ex, Deputy Alexander “Renny” Renton, turned out to be a fit man somewhere near my own age (midthirties) and a few inches over six feet tall. He had a good blank face, which he used as he gave the contents of the back section of my Jetta a thorough visual examination.

Then he turned to study Mary Jo. His blank face intensified until it became broody.

“A werewolf, huh?” he said finally.

She tilted her head at him in mild inquiry. The expression on her face caused him to laugh ruefully.

“Of course I know,” he told her. “Why else would you be escorting the Alpha’s wife around at too-early o’clock in the morning? Besides, your people talked to my people because we share information between the sheriff’s office and the fire department like that.”

She smiled at his wry tone. “You mean someone started bragging that the fire department has a werewolf and the sheriff’s office doesn’t?”

“Maybe,” he said, nodding. “Do I have anything to worry about?”

“Oh,” she said, her face suddenly concerned. “Oh, whoops. Um, have you been getting a little hairier than usual? Have to shave a little more often? I’ve heard that it starts that way for the guys.”

“Cut it out, Mary Jo,” I growled. “Be nice to the helpful deputy.” I looked at Renny. “It’s not easy to get Changed to a werewolf. I guarantee you that you’ll be in no doubt about it if ever it happens to you.”

“Good to know,” he said. He looked at Mary Jo and shook his head.

“Do we have the right to remain silent?” Mary Jo asked.

“You aren’t under arrest,” he said with a quelling look. “Not yet, anyway. As long as you didn’t kill him, you probably won’t be. But Captain Allen is coming in and asked me not to start anything until he gets here. This would have been a lot easier for you if you had called us in the first place. Before there was a dead goblin whose head is in the back of the car. You know better, Mary Jo; why didn’t you call us in?”

She looked pointedly at me.

“The farmer didn’t want to be responsible for getting people killed,” I explained. “I agreed with him. Goblins are outside your ability to deal with.”

Renny’s eyes got cold, and he studied me for a moment. “All due respect, ma’am, you don’t know what we are capable of dealing with.”

“All due respect, Renny,” said Mary Jo, “I have a pretty freaking good idea of your capabilities. And I think Mr. Traegar’s decision to bring us in first was the correct one. We don’t really know what we’re dealing with when it comes to the fae—there is no way that the sheriff’s office would. We had two werewolves, Mercy, and the goblin king out there—and if it weren’t for the goblin king, we’d have failed to bring him in ourselves.”

He gave her a look. “I am going to ignore—just for a minute—how much my geek side is loving that apparently there is a goblin king in the world. And that he is—again apparently—here in the Tri-Cities. Even knowing that David Bowie is gone, I am giddy about this.” He said all that in a very dry, professional tone.

I was starting to really like this guy.

“What I am not ignoring is the name of your farmer,” he continued. “Mary Jo, did Keith Traegar really call in the werewolves to keep his son from fighting goblins? Traegar, who has anti-fae, anti-werewolf, and Bright Future signs all over his property?”

I had noticed the signs, actually.

Mary Jo laughed. “I thought you might enjoy that.”

Deputy Renton paused, then looked up at the sky, brightening now with true dawn. When he looked back at Mary Jo, he was grinning with pure, unadulterated joy. “I am so going to rub Jack Traegar’s nose in this for a very, very long time. His daddy called in the werewolves before he called his own son.”

He took in a deep breath, regrouped, and rubbed his hands together. “Where were we?” It seemed to be a rhetorical question because he answered it before anyone else said anything. “Ah, yes. The bloody head.”

He ducked down to take a look into the back of the Jetta again. “What we need, ladies, is a garbage sack. I will leave the body part in question with an official representative of the fire department and go find one. Wait here.”

And he trotted off to the dark building, whistling lightly under his breath.

“I like him,” I said at the same time Mary Jo said—in affectionate tones—“Weirdo.”

We looked at each other—and she broke first. “Okay,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see if he’s willing to give us another try. Anyone who is excited about the prospect of a goblin head might be able to deal with a girlfriend who is a werewolf.”

“Always a good sign when they don’t run screaming,” I agreed.

She tilted her head at me. “Maybe if you hadn’t decided to become Adam’s mate, I might like you.”

“Maybe if you weren’t such a backstabby puppy, I might like you, too,” I told her.

“Backstabby puppy?” Her voice rang with indignation. Then she grinned. “That shoe might fit.” She sobered. “I wanted someone human for him.”

“Him” was Adam, my mate.

“No coyotes allowed,” I murmured.

Mary Jo’s expression hardened. “He deserves someone who will take care of him, who doesn’t bring him more trouble.”

I raised my eyebrows. I’d thought we’d gone through all of this.

She waved a hand, her tough face giving way to sadness.

“He needs a Christy,” she told me honestly. “Someone worthy of him.”

Christy was Adam’s first wife. She was a cold, self-involved, manipulative bitch and I hated her. And I couldn’t express my opinion about why I hated her without causing a civil war in Adam’s pack, most of whom were her willing slaves.

“Why on earth would you want to do that to him?” I heard myself say. “Wasn’t once enough?”

Her mouth opened and then closed.

“She encouraged him to hate what he is,” I told her hotly. “Werewolf and man, both. Even back at the beginning, when I first met them, met him, when I still disliked him for being the control-freaky dominant that he is—even then I just wanted to smack her when she would look at him with big eyes and say, ‘You’re scaring me, Adam.’” I knew I’d done a passable imitation of Christy’s voice from Mary Jo’s widening eyes. “Do you know how long it took me to get him to express even mild anger after she left him?” He still occasionally waited for me to wince or back away from him when he was in a temper.

And I had exposed his pain to Mary Jo, who had no right to it.

That bit of shame finally put a guard back on my tongue. I ran my hands over my face a couple of times. “And I don’t know where that came from. He’s been divorced for a long time and she is, finally, in Eugene again, moved to her own damned town, and it is almost far enough away.” I’d really hoped that she’d find the man of her dreams in the Bahamas. The Bahamas were a lot farther away than Eugene. “Mary Jo, do you hate Adam so much you’d wish another Christy on him?”

Mary Jo’s mouth curled up. “Tell me how you really feel about her, Mercy.”

I growled at her and her smile grew, then faded back. “I’d forgotten that,” she said. “Forgotten how she’d cringe from him. From all of us.” Before I could read the expression on her face, her eyes went to the building and I knew Renny had returned.

“Showtime,” I said.

After leading us up a set of stairs and through a couple of locked doors, long hallways, and the main office, Renny brought us into a room that I presumed to be a conference room—because that was what the sign next to the door read. It was bigger than I expected, big enough for six or eight people to sit around the table comfortably.

He’d dealt with the head himself, loading it, tarp and all, into the big black garbage bag. It had dripped more than a little. I felt a twinge of Lady Macbeth—“who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” The upside was that the mess made my decision as to whether to get new carpet throughout the car pretty easy.

He put the head on the table, steadying it when it rocked a little. He hadn’t looked at the head itself—I didn’t blame him. I didn’t want to see it again.

“Properly,” he told us, “you should have called the coroner in and this wouldn’t be a problem at all.” He glanced at Mary Jo. “You should know that much about procedures.”

She shrugged and gave him a nod. “I do, and you’re right. It’s just that La—the goblin king told us what to do. It didn’t occur to me that we might have made smarter choices until just before I called you.”

I still didn’t think Larry had done anything magical to influence me. Maybe I was fooling myself, but I thought I’d have noticed if he’d tried anything like that. But given that Mary Jo had done the same thing I’d done—maybe if the king of the goblins tells you to do something, you do it. Something like the way an Alpha wolf can make people, even people not in his pack, follow his command. I’d say “his or her command,” but so far as I knew, there were no female Alpha werewolves.

Renny was frowning at Mary Jo. “Having never seen a goblin king, I’ll take your word for that. I’ll give that explanation a toss at the captain and see if it floats with him, too.”

He looked around. “Take a seat. Anything substantial you’ve got to say should wait for the captain. Can I get you something to drink?”

While we waited for his captain, I called Adam and told his voice mail everything that had happened, beginning with the fact that we were all safe and Mary Jo and I were sitting in the sheriff’s office with the goblin’s head.

I got a call as I was finishing up the message and wasn’t quite agile enough with the phone to pick up the call. But the Benton County Sheriff’s Office called me back.

I listened for a few minutes, then told them where I was and handed the phone to Mary Jo’s Renny. He got about sixty seconds into the call before an expression very close to ecstasy crossed his face.

“Could you repeat that?” he said. “No, I’m not laughing at you. I heard you just fine. I only want to hear it one more time because I’m pretty sure that I’ll never hear exactly those words together ever again.”

We left Renny still waiting for his captain with the goblin head. I assured him that I didn’t want the tarp back.

Driving out to meet the Benton County Sheriff’s officer, I looked at the sunny sky and sighed. I called Tad again.

“You are going to be late because why?” asked Tad blearily. Then he sounded more alert. “Didn’t we already have this conversation? Or did I have a nightmare? It was about a dead goblin, right?”

I sighed and said, “It was about a goblin. Now it’s about zombie miniature goats. Or miniature goat zombies. Nigerian dwarf goats. Twenty of them running free all around Benton City, apparently.”

“Miniature zombie goats,” murmured Mary Jo. “I think that sounds the cutest. I can see the newspaper headlines now.”

“Are they dead?” Tad asked.

“That’s what ‘zombie’ means,” said Mary Jo loudly, to make sure Tad heard her. “But we’re on our way to kill them again.”

There was a little pause. Tad said, “Zombie miniature goats. Roaming the countryside. Doing what zombie goats do . . . whatever that is. I think there might be a song in that. Or a movie that is only supposed to be good if you are high on something psychedelic. Okay, Mercy, I’ll see you around lunchtime. Good luck with your mini goat zombies.”

“Thank you,” I said with dignity. “I don’t know about lunch, it depends on how long it takes us to find all of the goats.”

“Do you need help?” he asked.

“Always.” I sighed. “But it is too late for me. You just stood there watching when I went out on that bridge and started blabbing about the Tri-Cities being our territory to guard, when any idiot could have seen that I needed you to shove a gag in my mouth.”

He laughed and hung up. The jerk.

The outskirts of Benton City, another of the little satellite towns that surrounded the Tri-Cities, were filled with small-acreage farms sprinkled amid orchards and vineyards. I didn’t bother looking for addresses; I just found the house with all the activity.

We turned into a driveway next to a tidy but not beautiful pen that enclosed maybe a quarter of an acre. The side of the fence nearest to the driveway had been cut open.

There were four sheriff’s vehicles parked next to a miniature-goat-sized barn that was painted blue with white trim. Five deputies stood near their cars and watched me drive in. About twenty yards from the deputies was a small and well-kept house with a big, friendly wraparound porch. There were four people on the porch: a woman, a child, a man, and a giant-sized man who looked as though he ate locomotives for lunch.

I parked in between the house and the sheriff’s cars.

“Face-off,” said Mary Jo before she opened her door and got out.

She was right. It was impossible to miss the implied hostility in the empty space between the deputies and the people on the porch. For that matter, there was some hostility between the deputies, too.

“First the sheriff’s office, then the civilians,” I murmured to Mary Jo.

I hung back and let her take the lead with the law enforcement. One of the deputies had misstepped with the civilians, I thought, watching the aggressive stances. He’d gotten some blowback and they were split three to two. I was betting, from his clenched shoulders, that the man with the runner’s build was the culprit. But it might be his stocky buddy. He’d been reprimanded and it had stuck because he was hanging back and letting the others talk.

Body language shouts louder than words in most cases.

I half listened to what they had to say, because most of it was just a repeat of the information I’d gotten on the initial phone call. Once I had the deputies analyzed, I studied the people waiting on the porch without looking directly at them.

Family and family friend, I thought—the giant was noticeably not Hispanic.

The farm belonged to Arnoldo Salas; the goats had belonged to his ten-year-old son. Arnoldo wasn’t hard to pick out.

An extremely fit man in his midforties, he stood in the center of the porch, one hand on the shoulder of a teary-eyed boy while his other arm was wrapped around a woman who looked to be his wife, who wasn’t in much better condition than the child. He watched me with hostility.

Maybe he didn’t like werewolves.

Mary Jo’s voice broke into my concentration. “Why in the world would someone make zombie goats?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “Let’s see what we can find out.”

We headed toward the house, the deputies trailing after us.

According to what I’d been told, the Salas parents spoke only a little English. The giant—who looked even more hard-bitten up close, an impression not detracted from by the Marine tattoos he wore—stepped forward.

“Mr. Salas did not call the werewolves in,” he said.

I weighed a dozen responses, glad I had Mary Jo with me and not Ben. I could count on Mary Jo to let me take point.

“There are zombie goats running around,” I said. “We can deal with them without getting hurt. It would help to know as much as possible.”

“They were my goats,” said the boy in a soggy voice. “I milk them and breed them for money to pay for college.”

The Marine reached back and rubbed the boy’s head.

“Mercy is one of the good guys,” the boy said. “She killed the troll on the Cable Bridge. I saw it on TV.”

Not me, but the pack.

The man looked at Salas. The boy said something in Spanish.

Salas met my gaze and held it. Then his wife patted his arm and said something to the Marine.

He nodded respectfully to her, and when he turned back to me he dropped most of the hostility. “They were his idea. His pets. Some”—he changed the word he was going to use at the last moment—“jerk killed them all. He found them at feeding time, about seven at night last night.”

“It took the sheriff’s office this long to get here?” I asked.

He glanced around at the uniformed people behind me and hesitated. Finally, he said, “Arnoldo thought they would wait until morning, ma’am. They thought they would ask their neighbors if anyone saw anything.”

“The police have important things to do,” said the boy. “Maybe dead goats, even twenty of them, would not be important.”

The hostile deputy snorted, the one with the runner’s build. “If your parents are both legal, why wouldn’t they call the police?”

And the figurative temperature shot to the ceiling.

“With an attitude like that, I wonder why they didn’t call you in,” the big Marine standing next to Salas said.

Time to take control of this situation so that Mary Jo and I could go looking for zombies and no one would get arrested or shot.

“I know of a few incidents around here that might make some people a little worried about calling the law in,” I said softly. I met the hostile deputy’s eyes. His name tag read Fedders. He saw the color of my skin, I could see it in his eyes.

“You probably know about those incidents, too,” I said.

He started to say something, but I interrupted him.

“Be very careful,” I said softly. “I’m not afraid of you. Before you say anything more, you should take a deep breath and remember that I’m also second in the Columbia Basin werewolf pack.” His face tightened and I continued. “And we have a very good lawyer.”

“And she kills trolls,” said the boy.

I nodded. “And I kill trolls.”

The deputy’s friend nudged him. “My brother, the one in the Pasco PD, was on that bridge,” he said. “Time to stand down.”

Fedders’s face flushed, but he took a deep breath. I don’t know whether it was his friend’s urging, the thought of the lawyer, or the troll killing, but he backed down. He didn’t say anything, but it was in his body language. He lost three inches of height and he took a step back. Good enough for me.

“The Salases are legal,” the Marine told me firmly.

“I don’t care,” I told him. “As these gentlemen aren’t with immigration, they shouldn’t, either.” I didn’t actually know if that was true or not, but it should have been.

A young, very blond deputy, who had remained quiet, said a few words in liquid Spanish.

I caught “how” and “killed.”

Salas looked at the Spanish-speaking deputy and frowned.

The deputy said something else and Mrs. Salas laughed, then covered her mouth and carefully looked away from Fedders.

Salas looked at his wife, at his friend, then began speaking, and the young deputy took notes.

“He says,” the deputy told me when Salas had finished, “that they all had their throats cut. There was no sign of a struggle. Someone collected their blood.” He glanced around at the other deputies. “I think, given the circumstances, that we should believe him?” At the last he looked at me.

I shrugged. “I’m not an expert in zombies,” I told them. “I’ve never had much to do with them.” But I knew that they were witchcraft, and witchcraft was powered by body parts with a leaning toward blood and bone. “But if something weird happened, any weirdness that preceded that is probably connected. We”—I indicated Mary Jo—“can find the goats. I don’t know exactly what to do with them, but I have resources. Let me make another call.”

Elizaveta Arkadyevna was our witch on retainer. It sometimes amazes me how much of the supernatural world has adopted lawyerlike techniques. I don’t know whether that says something about lawyers—or something about the supernatural.

Elizaveta was in Europe. She’d gone to help me, and stayed when Bonarata had made her an interesting temporary job offer. But her family was still here and obliged to our pack.

I called Elizaveta’s number and a woman’s voice answered it, soft and Southern. “This is the home of Elizaveta Arkadyevna,” she said. “I’m afraid that she’s not here and her family is all tied up right now. What can I do to help you?”

No one in Elizaveta’s family had an accent like that. Elizaveta clung to her Russian accent, but everyone else sounded newscaster American, the born-in-the-Pacific-Northwest kind of voice.

I had a very bad feeling. Especially since I was pretty sure that her “all tied up” wasn’t a figure of speech. It wasn’t that I could tell if she was lying or not—over the phone, sometimes I can tell and sometimes I can’t. It was that I heard the sound of people in pain.

I cut the line. There was nothing I could say that would be useful under the circumstances. Zombies and something off at our local witch’s home. Coincidences are always possible, even if unlikely.

I thought a moment and called Adam. His voice mail picked up again and I said, “We have miniature zombie goats in Benton City and when I called Elizaveta’s house, a strange woman with a thick Southern accent picked up the phone. Background noises suggest that Elizaveta’s family is in trouble.” Then I called Darryl.

Darryl Zao was our pack’s second. Unless you included me, who, as Adam’s mate, was technically above Darryl. Our pack’s ranks were currently a little convoluted as tradition belatedly met women’s liberation and sputtered. The road to enlightenment was a little bumpy, but we were on the right path.

Anyway, I called Darryl. He’d be up. He ran every morning at six A.M.

He answered, his voice distorted by his car’s phone system. “Yes.”

I explained the situation to him. “I have the goats covered, more or less. We’ll figure out what to do with them until better-educated minds can be put to the problem.”

“I’ll grab a few wolves and head over to Elizaveta’s,” he said.

“Just recon,” I told him. “Unless Adam picks up his phone or listens to the message I just gave him. See what is going on over there. Then we contact the wicked witch herself and let her make the calls. There are witches who can control wolves,” I reminded him.

He paused. “Should I bring Post, or leave him out of it?”

I frowned. “He doesn’t remember anything. Why bring him in?”

Sherwood Post (not his real name—but it would do until he figured out what that was) had been discovered when the Seattle pack cleaned out a nasty coven of witches. It had taken a while for him to regain human form—and he was never able to regenerate one of his legs, which was weird. Werewolves either regenerate or they die. He didn’t remember anything and no one knew who he was except (we all thought) Bran, the Marrok. Bran had gifted Sherwood with his unusual name and sent him off to our pack.

“Because,” said Darryl, “he’s sitting right next to me.”

“Well, then,” I told him, exasperated. “Ask him if he wants to go or not. Take him if he wants to go, drop him off somewhere if he doesn’t. This isn’t a war mission, it’s a recon. We’ve got enough on our plate. We’ll leave any warfare to Elizaveta unless she asks otherwise.”

“Problems?” asked the Spanish-speaking deputy.

“I hope not,” I said. “But I think we’re on our own.”