Storm Cursed

3

Mary Jo and I spent the next couple of hours catching adorable zombie goats. She could just pick them up in her massive jaws and deliver them. I had to let my coyote find them, then shift back to my human self to catch and carry them back. They might be small for goats, but the adults weighed nearly what my coyote did.

Luckily I usually carried a backpack in my car that I could shove my clothes into. Otherwise, I’d have spent the morning walking around naked, carrying dead goats with red eyes and a taste for blood.

Not that the zombies could actually eat anything. In the first place, their throats were cut. One of the adults I’d caught was so deeply wounded that its head just lolled around; there was no muscle to move its neck. In the second place, they were dead. No systems go. But it didn’t stop them from causing lots of mayhem. Small animals—squirrels, quail, chickens, and the like—didn’t fare well. I would have thought that zombies would be slow, like in the movies. But these, at least, were not.

Because we were using our animal forms, we had to leave our phones in the car. I had to trust that Adam got my messages and that Darryl was staying safe.

I finally figured out that Darryl would rather have left Sherwood behind, and he’d been hoping that I would give the order. It was interesting that Adam’s second didn’t feel comfortable giving orders to Sherwood, who was, supposedly, below him in the pack structure. I tried to figure out whether that was a new thing or not, but then I detected another zombie miniature goat.

Detected, not scented. I put that aside, too.

Darryl and Sherwood had their jobs; Mary Jo and I had ours. Mine was to find as many of the miniature zombie goats as I could, not to explore too hard how I was finding them. Concentrate on the job at hand and sort everything else out later.

I found my last escapee about two miles from the Salases’ house. It was a baby goat, black with a big white spot in the middle of its chest, nearly as short as the dachshund it was attacking. And I didn’t find this one because of my coyote nose, either.

The goat must have backtracked, because the scent I was following continued down the road. But I felt the zombie and it was directly on my left. I stopped running but stayed where I was.

I had an odd grab bag of talents. I could sense magic better than the werewolves. Magic didn’t always work on me, and when it did, sometimes it didn’t work as intended. I could turn into a coyote. And I saw ghosts, which I’d always dismissed as mostly useless.

But over the last few years, I’ve been learning that I could do a little more.

Just then, standing on the verge of a dirt road in the maze of rural roads above the Yakima River, I could feel something both animate and dead, and it was on the other side of a hedge where a small dog was yapping its head off.

I burrowed under the hedge and found the goat-dachshund standoff. I changed to human, pulled on my jeans and T-shirt, and hoped that my faith in the little dog wasn’t misplaced. I’d hate to live with the guilt of the death of someone’s pet just because I didn’t want to run around in late-morning traffic naked as a jaybird.

I did not think, as hard as I could manage to not-think, about the fact that I had felt where it was. Ghosts were one thing. I’d been seeing them as long as I could remember. I was kind of used to my interaction with them. I didn’t want to have the same connection to zombies.

Dachshunds are tough; she held her own just fine until I zipped my jeans. Hard to tell who would have won, zombie or dog. When I snagged the zombie kid and hauled it away, kicking and snapping, the dog pranced off with her tail in the air. Whatever my doubts, that dog was sure she had beaten the nasty intruder.

I jogged back at a pretty good clip despite my bare feet—my carry bag wasn’t big enough for shoes. I met Mary Jo, who was following the same trail I’d picked up—she must have found her last goat faster than I did and come back to help me. The sight of her had a few cars pulling over so that people could take pictures with their cell phones.

Yes, it was a good thing I’d taken time to put my clothes on.

One of the deputies raised the lid on the zombie goat corral, an empty dumpster that had been hauled over next to the damaged goat pen—Salas’s Marine friend’s idea. So far, the big, green, smelly metal box had proven to be escape-proof.

I could feel them in the dumpster without looking. As if I’d become sensitized to the way the zombies felt. I could tell how many of the little zombies were bumping around just as I could tell when there was a ghost around, even if I might not be able to see it.

It wasn’t so bad if I could tell there were zombies around, I thought. I’d made it thirty-odd years before running into my first zombies; it might be another thirty years before I met another.

By now, all of the sheriff’s cars except for two were gone. Three of the original deputies remained, but we’d been getting drop-ins from law enforcement from as far away as Prosser and Pasco, including the highway patrol. Everyone wanted to see the miniature zombie goats.

“It could have been worse,” I told the deputy who opened one side of the dumpster lid for me so I could drop my little zombie in with the rest of the adorable, blood-hungry fiends.

She said, “Right? They could have been full-sized goats and we wouldn’t have any idea what to do with them. Hard enough to keep goats in without them being impervious to pain. This dumpster is picking up a lot of dents that it didn’t have when we started. What do you plan on doing with these things?” She glanced at the dumpster. “You are planning on doing something with them?” And not leave them to us, please; half of that thought was unsaid but not unheard.

“I don’t know,” I told her, not quite honestly.

I wasn’t sure exactly how to kill . . . how to eliminate zombies. But I was pretty sure we could burn them. I didn’t know if real fire would do the trick, but we had Joel, inhabited by the spirit of a volcano dog.

If he couldn’t manage it by himself, we could bring in the big guns—Aiden, my fire-wielding ward. He wasn’t officially our ward yet, actually. We were finding it very difficult to become the legal guardians of a boy who had no paperwork trail. I was sure either Joel or Aiden could reduce the goats to ash—even zombie goats couldn’t come back from ash.

I just didn’t know if I wanted to advertise that we could call upon that kind of power. And I wasn’t sure either Joel or Aiden had enough control to just burn the goats and stop.

“Are any of the Salases still around? I’d like to ask a few questions.”

She nodded. “Jimmy, Mr. Salas, and Mr. Salas’s very large friend are all sitting on the porch talking about their days in the Marines. The mom is fending off the hoi polloi from the front yard.”

“Mr. Salas was a Marine, too?” I asked.

She nodded. “And English is his native tongue; he was born and raised on a quarter-horse ranch outside San Diego. I don’t think Mrs. Salas speaks English, but he is certainly bilingual. Not the first time I’ve seen the ‘speak no English’ used when people are facing hostile law enforcement.”

She glanced over at the Salas house and then back at me.

“Fedders is a problem,” she admitted with a sigh. “Apparently he’s better known in the Spanish-speaking community around here than we thought. He was first on scene.”

She gave me a quick smile. “He’s like a black sheep—part of the family but also awkward and occasionally dangerous. You wouldn’t think it from today’s performance, but he’s really good with trauma victims—even those from our Spanish-speaking communities. When he’s helping someone who is hurt, he drops all that crap. I’m sure Captain Gonzales will explain, again, why antagonizing people isn’t useful. Someday it will stick, or he’ll cause such a big problem they’ll promote him right off the streets.”

She glanced at Mary Jo, who was keeping back far enough to give the officer a false sense of safety. “Maybe some big werewolf will get tired of him, chew him up, and spit him out with an attitude adjustment.”

Mary Jo grinned at her.

“My, what big teeth,” said the deputy with a smile, though her hand slipped toward her gun. Funny how Little Red Riding Hood came up whenever the werewolves were about.

Mary Jo closed her mouth and wagged her tail.

A nice path opened up for us through the gathering crowd—werewolves are useful like that—and we slipped past the hordes unmolested. It wasn’t really a big group of people, maybe fifteen or twenty.

“Mr. Salas,” I said. “Mary Jo and I were able to round up all the goats. I’ll make sure they are taken care of. If anyone gives you trouble or asks you to pay for damages, you call us.” I gave him a card. “This is not your fault in any way. You are not responsible for any damages, and if someone needs to be reminded of that, my husband will take care of it.”

He took the card and looked thoughtful.

Mary Jo nudged me to get my attention, then she trotted off. I assumed that she was going to regain her human shape. I didn’t let my gaze linger on her; instead, I considered the Salases’ situation.

“Did you, your wife, or your children have any trouble with anyone lately?” I asked. “With a stranger, probably.” Certainly.

There were, I understood, several kinds of practitioners who could create zombies. But this was witchcraft. As soon as I touched the first goat, I could feel the black magic humming in my bones and turning my stomach.

Leaving aside the black magic—because there were no black-magic witches in the Tri-Cities—no local witches would have done anything like it. They were too afraid of Elizaveta and her family. And we didn’t, to my knowledge, have anyone with this kind of power except for Elizaveta herself. Zombies took serious mojo—I knew that much.

But I couldn’t explain our local witch population to Salas or the police; I didn’t want to cause anyone to go out hunting witches. That was Elizaveta’s job.

Salas shook his head. He called a question to his wife, who shook her head. “A moment,” he said. “I will ask my son.”

“He served this country for eight years,” the blond deputy (presumably Jimmy) told us, a snap in his voice. “And he has to hide when the police come to call?”

“No,” I said. “Because there are deputies like you here.”

Salas returned to the porch, shaking his head. “No. No unusual arguments. But Santiago, my son, he says there was a lady who stopped yesterday morning while he was feeding his goats. She wanted to buy them all, all twenty, but he didn’t like her so he told her they were not for sale. He stayed inside the pen while she talked—the way he said it makes me think that maybe she wanted him to come out to her car. He told me that she sounded like one of my friends from the Corps—Porter. Porter is from Georgia.”

Southern was how the witch at Elizaveta’s sounded. I wondered if they were the same witch.

Twenty goats she couldn’t buy, twenty goats that were killed and turned into zombies. Then I had a terrible thought. If she could take the goats, why couldn’t she take the boy? And what did she need with twenty zombie goats? She didn’t even take them with her. That sounded like spite to me.

I looked at the pen that was next to the house. It was the side farthest from the house where the fence was torn open. That section of fence wasn’t visible from the road. “Did the goats damage the pen, or did that happen earlier?”

“Whoever killed the goats cut open the pen,” Salas said. “The goats were dead, so we didn’t bother to repair it.”

I wondered if the witch who had killed them had returned later that night and reanimated them, or if there was a time component. That the goats had been spelled as they died, but it had taken a few hours for them to turn to zombies.

Today that didn’t matter, but I would find out. I didn’t know as much about witches or zombies as I obviously should.

Had she taken the goats because she hadn’t been able to persuade Santiago to come to her? Consent had magical implications for most of the magic-using folk; I didn’t know how it played for witches.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that your son was smart to stay in the pen when the lady came by.”

If the witch had taken the goats, surely she would have been able to walk in and take the boy if she had wanted to. But maybe, I thought, not in the middle of the day. If Salas’s son had come out of the pen and up to her car, she could have taken him then and there with no one thinking anything of it.

Maybe the goats had been second choice.

“Tell him—Santiago? Tell Santiago that if he sees her again, he should go inside the house, lock the doors, and call the number on that card.”

His eyes narrowed and his bearing changed. It was like he had put on the same invisible cloak of readiness that Adam carried around all of the time. Deputy Jimmy had that, too. It was a matter of posture, mostly—head up, shoulders back—but also of intensity. Had Salas looked like that when I’d driven up, I’d have picked him for ex-military of some sort right off the bat.

“You think she is the one who did this? A bruja?”

I shrugged. “A witch did this, I can smell it. I don’t know who that witch was.”

Though for some reason her scent twigged my memory. As if I might not have scented her before, but maybe something about her. Irritating, but until my subconscious worked it through, there was no use trying to figure out what the connection was. When I met her, maybe I would figure it out. I had a feeling I was going to get a chance to do that—predators don’t usually just wander off after they make a bold move on another predator’s territory.

“Maybe,” I said carefully, “the lady who talked to your son was just someone fascinated with your dwarf goats. But she made him uneasy. I’d pay attention to that.”

“I have noticed that people who listen to their instincts live longer,” Salas agreed.

There were three messages on my phone when I got into the car. The first was from someone who wanted to talk to me about my credit card. It was a scam and I erased it.

The second was from Adam.

“Got your messages, sweetheart,” he said. “I called Darryl, who is on his way to Elizaveta’s. I can meet him there if I hurry. Good luck with the zombie miniature goats.”

The third one was from my mother.

“I haven’t heard from you in a month,” she said. “Are you alive?” And she hung up.

Mary Jo, who’d been checking her own phone, snorted.

My phone rang while I was texting yes to Mom. I checked the number and smiled.

“Hey, Adam. You missed out on the miniature zombie goat hunt.”

“About those zombies,” he said, his voice solemn. “You have a better nose for magic than any of us. Do you think you could pick between one practitioner’s magic and another’s?”

“Like could I compare the zombie goat magic to whatever you’ve found at Elizaveta’s?” I asked. “There are a lot of witches practicing in Elizaveta’s house. That will make it hard. But I would recognize the scent of the witch who made the zombies. I don’t know that I would recognize the feel of her magic. Maybe?”

“When a witch is dead, their magic dies, too, right?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “Can’t you ask any of Elizaveta’s people?”

“No,” he said with finality.

I inhaled. “Adam?”

“Everyone at Elizaveta’s home is dead,” he said.

“How many?” I asked.

“As far as we can tell, everyone in Elizaveta’s family,” he said. “We found fourteen bodies. I’m waiting for Elizaveta to confirm that.”

I didn’t know any of them, could have picked maybe two out of a police lineup—but fourteen? I didn’t like Elizaveta; she scared me. I had a hard time liking people who scared me. But I had known her for a long time, and she was ours.

And anyone who could wipe out Elizaveta’s family would have a shot at doing the same to a bunch of werewolves. Elizaveta might be the real powerhouse, but her whole family was formidable—or so it had been explained to me.

“Okay, then,” I said, thinking hard. “I’m not a witch. The only witch I’ve dealt with is Elizaveta. If this is important, maybe we should get a witch to look into it instead of me. There is that witch in Seattle that Anna knows. Should I call Anna and get her name?”

He considered it. Exhaled noisily through his nose and then said, “I think we have enough unknown players in the Tri-Cities right now. Maybe if we need an expert. I will check with Elizaveta when she gets back to me. As for the rest, I think you should come to Elizaveta’s house and see what we found. You have a better feel for magic, and that might be important. Even if Elizaveta comes as fast as she can, it will be days, not hours. Whatever traces of magic are there might dissipate before then.”

There was another little pause and he said, “And I need to get your take on what we found, not the opinion of a witch we don’t know and can’t trust. I need to make some decisions, and I’d like to see if your conclusions match mine.”

I disconnected and looked at Mary Jo, who was looking as shell-shocked as I was. “Do you think you could get Joel or Aiden . . . um—maybe Joel and Aiden might be better—to come and incinerate our poor victims? Preferably with some discretion? I don’t want Aiden’s picture all over the Internet.”

Joel wouldn’t have that problem. No one would associate the volcanic tibicena with Joel’s human form.

“Yes.” Mary Jo opened the car door and got out again. The seat tried to follow her and she set it back into the car. “Stay there,” she told it. To me she said, “No worries, Mercy. I’ll figure out how to do it out of sight. I have all the tools I need.” She held up her cell phone. “Go do what you need to do, Mercy. I’ve got your back.”

Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya had a sprawling house just a few miles from my home.

She used to live in town. But after the neighbors complained about the sound of her granddaughter’s nightly oboe practicing, she moved out to a house on five acres. She leased the land to a hay company—they didn’t come out at night, so no one was around to be kept up by Elizaveta’s granddaughter practicing her oboe.

I was sure her granddaughter had an oboe and that it was just coincidence that bad oboe playing can sound remarkably like screaming.

I hadn’t lied to Adam; I didn’t know much about witches, and the more I learned, the less certain I was about what I did know. As I understood it, witches had power over living things. Magic practitioners who could work with inanimate objects were wizards.

Witches got power from things of spiritual consequence. These included life-changing events: birth, death, dying, but also lesser things like emotions. Sacrifice, willing or unwilling, was supposed to have an especially great effect. They also did a lot of their work using body parts, bodily fluids—blood, hair, spit. I was a little vague on how that worked exactly.

Though there were three different types of witches, they all started the same way—they were born with certain abilities. At some point after that, they chose what they were willing to trade for power, staying white or becoming gray or black.

White witches generated power from themselves and the environment around them. They were less powerful than the other two kinds. The black witches tended to view them as fast food (and I wasn’t sure about the gray witches, either). Most white witches were paranoid and secretive. I had only met a few of them.

Black witches were power hungry. They went for the big power boosts—death, yes. But torture-then-death generated more power from the same victim. They fed more easily off their own kind, but they could use any living being. They actively pursued victims with magical connections. That probably accounted for the fact that few supernatural communities tolerated witches who practiced black magic. That and the fact that anything that scared the humans—and black magic was difficult to keep hidden—was bad for everyone else.

Black witches were the most powerful of all witches.

Most of the witches I knew were gray witches. I wasn’t sure of the exact line between gray and black, not from the witches’ side, anyway. I could tell the difference from a good distance—black magic reeks.

I thought that the difference between black and gray had something to do with consent. A gray witch could cut off a person’s finger and feed on the generated power of the sacrifice and pain, as long as their victim agreed to it. I was pretty sure that a gray witch could make zombies, but these had smelled of black magic.

As soon as I drove past the wall of poplar trees that marked the border of Elizaveta’s property, I could see that there were a lot of pack vehicles at the house. As I approached, Warren’s old truck pulled out of the drive. He slowed as he saw me, stopping in the middle of the road.

Since there wasn’t anyone coming, I did the same. He rolled down his window. The Jetta’s driver’s-side window didn’t work yet. I got out of the car and walked to Warren’s truck.

Aiden was in the front seat, looking like he should have had a booster chair. Joel, in his presa Canario dog form, took up the space between Warren and Aiden on the bench seat with some of him left over to spill onto the floor. It didn’t look comfortable, but Joel smiled at me anyway. Compared to his tibicena form, the presa Canario looked positively friendly.

“Heading to Benton City to burn some miniature goat zombies?” I asked.

Warren shook his head. “No, ma’am. Mary Jo had a disposal company come haul the dumpster out to the Richland landfill. We’ll turn the goats to ash out of sight and away from anything else that might catch fire.”

Yep. Mary Jo was competent. Too bad for her, because this was not how to get off my emergency call list.

“Then we come back here,” Warren said. He grimaced. “There are some things we need to burn here, too. But not until you check things out and the boss gets the okay from Elizaveta.”

“Bad?” I asked. “I mean, I know that Elizaveta’s family is all dead.”

He glanced at Aiden and sighed. “I think this gives ‘bad’ a new low.”

Aiden frowned at him. “I lived in Underhill, Warren. I don’t know what you all think you are protecting me from.”

“Just because you’ve seen bad things doesn’t mean you have to see any more,” said Warren with dignity.

I waved Warren off and got back in the Jetta. I hadn’t really needed to ask him if it was bad at Elizaveta’s house. My answer was in the massing of the pack. It was a Wednesday, and most of the people here should have been at work. Adam wouldn’t have called them all just to deal with bodies. He must have been worried that the people who had killed Elizaveta’s family might be coming back.

I parked the Jetta next to Adam’s SUV. Before I got out, Adam was beside my car.

He wrapped his arms around me and lifted me off my feet, his face buried in the crook of my neck as if he hadn’t seen me for a decade instead of . . . at lunchtime yesterday. I could feel his chest lift as he breathed in my scent and it made me do the same to him. Musk and mint and Adam. Yum.

He put me on the ground, started to release me, then thought better of it (that might have had something to do with the grip I had around his waist). He bent down and kissed me.

His kiss told me a lot of things. It told me he loved me. The careful tightness of his grip told me that he was too tired to trust his control. The desperation . . . our sex life is very good and enthusiasm is a normal part of it, but that kiss was more like the ones I got when we were both naked and ready rather than a “hello, am I glad to see you” kind of kiss. So the desperation told me that whatever they’d found in Elizaveta’s house had disturbed him a great deal.

I kissed him back, trying to give him whatever he needed from me. At least that was my motivation at first. After about five seconds it wasn’t about anything other than his hands on my skin, my hands on his, the taste of his mouth, and the scent of his rapidly aroused body.

I felt the buzz of electric connections sitting up and taking notice of his strong hand on the back of my neck and the shape of his body against my hips. He was hot against my bare skin where my shirt was rising up and exposing my midriff. Even through the thickness of my jeans, I could feel his warmth.

I loved it.

Adam laughed softly against me, running his lips over my neck, biting down lightly on the tendon, and sending shivers right down to my toes. Then he took my lips again.

“Don’t give in to the nudge!” called Paul urgently. “You know you’ll regret it!”

“Quick,” said Zack, “does anyone have any of that essential oil stuff that Jesse’s friend’s mom sold Mercy?”

Adam stifled another laugh, this one a laugh of self-amusement mixed with frustration as he pulled back. He steadied me and waited for his own breath to calm down.

“The nudge always wins,” he murmured to me. “Thank God.”

“Just not right here and now,” I murmured back.

I should have been appalled, I suppose. Here we were in public, in full view of a good percentage of the pack, in front of what I was pretty sure was a murder scene.

But I’ve learned that there are always terrible things, and sometimes it is very important to grasp what joy and beauty you can, whenever you can. And Adam is beautiful, inside and out. Better than that—he is mine.

Adam is average height, and that’s the only average thing about him. Even back when I disliked him heartily, I never denied that he was about the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen. Even married and mated, at odd moments I was surprised by the sheer power of his looks.

I think it was because normally, his looks are not the things that make me love him. I love his intelligence, his care for his pack—and even for me. Though I have to admit that I chafe under his protectiveness sometimes. I spent a lifetime taking care of myself; I did not need protection. Still, when I was facing vampires, trolls, or the IRS (my business had just gotten that dreaded audit letter), Adam was the person I most wanted at my side.

I love his honesty, his temper, his dedication to his word and his duty. I love his humor, the way it creases the edges of his eyes and softens the usual hard line of his mouth.

Yep, I have it bad.

We leaned against each other for a few seconds more, and then he stepped back reluctantly.

“Okay,” he said to me, his hands lingering on my shoulders (I found that my hands were reluctant to let go of him, too). “Back to business.”

“Yep,” I said. “Okay. Back to business.” I pulled my shirt down to cover my belly and then stood at mock attention. “I’m ready.”

He nodded. “I need you to go into Elizaveta’s house and see if you can find out if the person who created your miniature zombie goats in Benton City is the person who killed all of Elizaveta’s family. And if it isn’t, see if you can pick up anyone else’s scent.” He frowned. “Look for the magic that is left, Mercy, and see what it tells you. Look for strangers.”

“I can do that,” I told him slowly. “Just because I can’t pick out our zombie-making witch’s magic doesn’t mean it isn’t there, though. Differentiation between magic users isn’t something I’ve done. I don’t know that I’ve felt the magic of all of Elizaveta’s people.”

He nodded. “I need you to keep your eyes open while you go through the house. Tell me what you think.”

I frowned at him. I could tell something had really bothered him about what he’d found in there. Something more than all of the dead bodies. “Elizaveta isn’t a black witch—there is a stench to that.” She skirted the line pretty hard, but we’d know if she had started practicing black magic.

“Yes,” Adam said, and I relaxed a little.

Elizaveta and I were on shaky terms, but there was real affection between her and Adam. She liked him because he spoke Russian with a Moscow accent, and because, when she flirted with him, he flirted back. He liked her because she reminded him of some relative of his mother’s, an aunt I think, who came to visit them when he was nine or ten. I didn’t want Adam hurt.

“It’ll work best in my coyote form,” I told him and then added, because I didn’t want him to worry, “I’ve been bouncing back and forth capturing goats this morning. I can change again”—I could feel that—“but I’m not sure I can change back right away.”

He nodded. “Okay. I don’t think that time is so much of a factor that what you have to say can’t wait a couple of hours.”

What was it that he expected me to find?

“You coming with?” I asked.

He shook his head with a faint smile. He stepped back from me, finally, and I felt the loss of his touch. I’d been neck-deep in the craziness of reopening my garage. He’d been busy attending all his secret, hush-hush, middle-of-the-night meetings. We hadn’t had as much time together over the past few weeks as I was used to.

“If I come in, I might prejudice what you see,” he said. “Sherwood will go with you.” He glanced around and nodded to the peg-legged man who was in the middle of a quiet discussion with some other pack members.

Sherwood started over to us, his gait smooth in spite of the peg leg. He had a better prosthetic, and with that one on no one would ever have thought he was missing a leg. But most of the time when he thought there might be some action, he wore the peg leg, because the artificial limb was a lot more delicate and correspondingly more expensive.

“Sherwood?” I asked. Asking him to go into a witch’s house was unkind, I thought. It hadn’t been that long ago that he’d been discovered three-legged and half-crazed in a cage in a black witch’s den.

Adam said, “Sherwood knows the dangers better than anyone else here. I trust him to keep you safe.”

I looked up into Sherwood’s face with its wolf-wild eyes and said, “I thought you didn’t remember anything of your captivity?”

“Apparently some things are imprinted in my skin,” he said, his voice a few notes darker than usual. “Like the—” He broke off, shivered, and shook his head. “Never mind.”

“As soon as you’re done, we’ll gather the dead,” Adam told me. “Warren will bring our firestarters back with him as soon as he can. I’ve spoken to Elizaveta and told her we need to burn the bodies. She wasn’t convinced until I told her about the goats. She said that if there is a necromancer with that much power to burn running around, she’d rather her family be turned to ash than become another witch’s puppet.”

There was something in his voice that concerned me. But I let it lie. I’d find out soon enough what had turned this from a tragedy for our pack’s witch into something more.

Going into a house full of dead bodies wasn’t on the top ten of my bucket list. Going into a witch’s house with dead bodies was even lower on my scale of happy.

But Adam had asked it of me, so I went. Sherwood stayed in human form, but he didn’t look any happier about going in than I felt.

He opened the front door and turned on the lights.

“This house is dark,” he told me. “A little light doesn’t hurt anything.”

The front door opened directly into a living room that looked warm and friendly. Light-colored walls set off wooden floors that were covered in expensive-looking carpets that were, in turn, covered with comfortable-looking furniture. Big windows let in a lot of natural light, and two skylights let in more.

There was plenty of natural light. I gave Sherwood a puzzled glance, and then I walked through the door.

It didn’t feel light and friendly. It smelled like death, witchcraft, and black magic. The combination was stomach-turning. Suddenly the extra little bit of brightness from the lights didn’t seem like overkill at all. Anything that might brighten up the spiritual atmosphere, however insignificantly, was welcome.

“I know,” said Sherwood grimly when I sneezed in protest of the smell. “But you get used to it.”

There were no bodies in this room, but I looked around thoroughly anyway. Adam had noticed something that bothered him in this house, bothered him more than Elizaveta’s dead family, and I needed to figure out what it was.

The bodies began in the kitchen, three of them. I am not a medical professional. I’m a predator, yes, and I kill things. But my victims (mice and other small rodents, usually) die quickly from broken necks. I’m not a cat; I don’t play with my food.

Elizaveta’s family members—I recognized each of these, though I didn’t know their names—were missing pieces. Mostly fingers, ears, toes—survivable amputations. The woman was missing her nose.

They all wore pants and the woman had on a loose unbuttoned dress shirt—no shoes, no socks. The clothes were filthy and smelled of blood and other things. Some of that was because of the usual effects of death, but some was older. Elizaveta would never have tolerated slovenliness in her family, so whoever had held them had not allowed them to bathe or change their clothes.

The woman’s body was folded over a bowl that contained beaten egg that had been fresh a couple of hours ago. When I came to that, I took a good look at the room and where the bodies were. There was toast in the toaster and several slices on a large plate next to it. The stove was off, but there was a frying pan on it. On the counter next to the stove was a package of bacon—unopened, which was why I hadn’t smelled it earlier.

These people had been tortured—and some of the wounds were very fresh. All three of them had been in the middle of making breakfast, judging by the condition of the kitchen. Who gets tortured and then decides to make a meal? Witches, evidently. Strange. Even more strange was that they had died very quickly and all at the same time.

I examined each of them, sniffing their bodies. Then I went through the kitchen itself, pantry and all. The next room, a workroom of some sort, had four more bodies.

There was nothing wrong with any of these people, no wounds new or old. It looked as though they had dropped where they stood. I recognized only the teenaged girl. Her name had been Militza. She went to school with my stepdaughter, Jesse, though Militza was a couple of years younger. Jesse sometimes gave her rides home from school, though not recently.

Jesse had privately told me that Militza gave her the creeps. I’d told Jesse to tell Militza to find another ride. I think Jesse had been more polite than that.

“There are fourteen bodies,” Sherwood said dispassionately, as I explored the room. “Adam described them to Elizaveta, and she identified them. No survivors. Stop right there, don’t open that cabinet. There’s a sigil on the door. I don’t know what it will do, but I doubt it is anything nice.”

I stopped. I couldn’t sense anything over and above the magical-crafting residue that impregnated everything in the room. It was strong inside the cabinet I stood in front of, but no stronger than it had been other places. Apparently, Sherwood had a more subtle understanding of magic than I did. I found that very interesting.

Sherwood didn’t speak again until I’d moved on.

He picked up the one-sided conversation as easily as if he’d never stopped. “Whoever did this wiped Elizaveta’s people out. Elizaveta thinks it was probably another coven, trying to take over her territory while she is in Europe. She will be here as soon as she can.”

There were no more bodies on the first floor, though I noted that two chairs were missing from the dining room set. I went upstairs then, to search six bedrooms and three bathrooms. I found a lot of interesting things, but there weren’t any more bodies.

So I was prepared to find the other seven in the basement. Or at least I knew that there would be seven dead people in the basement, most of whom I’d probably met at one time or another. “Prepared” was probably too strong a word. I don’t know how I’d have been prepared for what I saw.

I have seen horrible things, things that haunt me in my dreams. But Elizaveta’s basement was one of the worst.

The basement was one big room, forty feet by twenty-five feet at a rough estimate, with a nine-foot ceiling and two doors that I assumed were bathrooms in opposite corners. Like the floor above it, the basement was well lit—though with daylight bulbs in LED fixtures, rather than windows.

A big utility sink was set up on one end of the room, and next to it was a pressure washer, the kind I use for cleaning cars. All of the rest of the walls were covered with metal racks containing various sizes of cages.

The center of the room looked almost like a doctor’s office, with twin metal examination tables. Near each bathroom was a chair that looked more like a dentist’s chair. All of them had manacles. All of them were occupied by bodies. Two additional bodies were tied to sturdy chairs that matched the ones I’d seen upstairs around the dining table. That meant there was another body down here somewhere.

Reluctantly, I approached the bodies. It had taken a very long time for them to die. Days, I thought, though never having tortured someone to death, I couldn’t be sure. Weeks maybe. The kitchen people had been in better shape than the ones down here. I searched each body carefully with both my nose and eyes.

The floor was cement with a drain. The killers hadn’t bothered to use the pressure washer to clean up after themselves, so I could see that the floor had been poured so that liquids would tend to flow to the drain without urging. Effluent from the bodies had made streams from their source to the drain.

But Elizaveta’s family weren’t the only dead bodies in the basement; the rest just didn’t happen to be human. The cages along the two long walls held dead birds—pigeons, doves, and chickens mostly, but there was an African gray parrot, a golden eagle, and a handful of parakeets. Next to the utility sink were cages of dead reptiles and amphibians.

On the wall opposite the utility sink were cages of dead small mammals. The top shelves were mice and rats. The rest were kittens and puppies.

Kittens and puppies tortured to death. If I’d been in my human body, I would have cried. I was not apologetic that their deaths bothered me more than the deaths of Elizaveta’s family. Those animals had been innocent, and I was not willing to say that of anyone else who had died here.

There were no flies, though the smell of rot was incredible. I had to assume that something kept the insects away, and it was probably not the stench—physical and spiritual—that permeated the room. Some of the smell was putrefaction, but most of it was the reek of black magic. Maybe flies were repelled by the scent of black magic. Or maybe the magic that had killed Elizaveta’s family had also killed all of the insects.

I started to go do my job, to leave the small dead creatures and search the corners for the missing dead body, when a movement caught my eye. I yipped for Sherwood, who was pacing with intent by the sink. I couldn’t smell him over the rest of it, but his skin was covered with sweat. He stopped and came over.

Without a word, he opened the cage I indicated and pulled out the body of one half-grown orange tabby kitten with gentle hands and set it aside.

“We missed this,” he said as he eased a black-and-white body out of the cage. Like the tabby, it was somewhere between kitten and cat.

The kitten twitched and tried to move away from him. “Poor thing,” he murmured. “Shh now, you’re safe.”

He pulled off his shirt and swaddled the cat in it, gently immobilizing it. He set the cat on the floor next to its cagemate.

He did a quick and complete check of the rest of the cages, but the black-and-white kitten was the only survivor. He picked up his shirt with the kitten and examined the animal more thoroughly while it struggled weakly.

Sherwood’s eyes were wholly human and raw with emotion when he met mine. “Missing an eye” was all he said.

You were missing a leg, I thought. Maybe it was a good thing I couldn’t talk in my coyote form.

I licked the face of the kitten gently. It tasted as foul as the whole basement smelled. But the touch of my tongue seemed to reassure it more than the werewolf’s voice.

Cats don’t like werewolves. The only exception I’ve ever seen to that is my own cat, Medea. I guessed that we were about to see if we could get this one to warm up to us.

“Have you seen enough?” he asked.

I started toward what I thought was the nearest bathroom, and he stepped between me and it. “No. You don’t want to go into the freezer. There are some things you don’t need to see. We should go.”

I looked pointedly at the dead bodies, scratching the floor once per body I could see. One on each of the two tables, two in the dentist chairs, two tied up on dining room chairs. I sneezed and looked around.

“I forgot,” he said.

He gave the kitten he held a worried look, but told it, “This should only take a minute.”

He strode briskly to a large storage bin near one of the corner rooms and pulled off the lid. It was a big, sturdy bin, but it shouldn’t have been big enough to store a body.

I peered inside and wished I hadn’t. The body inside was missing legs and arms—which explained the size of the bin. My brain wanted to turn the corpse into a stage prop. His face was almost featureless because his eyes, lips, nose, and ears had been removed long enough ago that the wounds had healed over with scar tissue.

He looked mummified, but my nose told me that he, like everyone else in the room, had been alive only a few hours earlier. I didn’t recognize him, but I knew the ghost who lingered, petting the corpse.

Sherwood’s voice was grim. “Adam said this was Elizaveta’s grandson and that likely Elizaveta had done most of the damage to him herself.”

His name had been Robert. The ghost looked at me, then spat over his shoulder and scowled. I ignored him as I sniffed dutifully at the pitiful body.

I made Sherwood wait until I’d sniffed around all of the bodies again, paying special attention to fingers and faces. Then we both escaped the basement of Elizaveta’s house. I don’t know who was more relieved: me, Sherwood, or that poor kitten.

I couldn’t change back. Adam assigned someone to take my car back to our house. Then he packed me, Sherwood, and the kitten into his SUV to head for the veterinary clinic while the pack pulled the bodies, human and otherwise, from the house. Pack magic would keep neighbors or low-flying aircraft from noticing what the pack was doing.

Everyone would wait for Warren to return with the firestarters. The plan was for Joel and Aiden to turn Elizaveta’s family—and all the dead animals—to ash.

Sherwood suggested that the house be burned down, too—which I was highly in favor of. Given the state of things that I’d seen, I doubted that anyone would ever be able to get a peaceful night’s sleep in that building without someone doing a major exorcism or something of the sort to lay the ghosts to rest. I’d never seen an exorcism performed in person, so I didn’t know if one would work.

Adam decided against burning Elizaveta’s house because he didn’t want to draw the attention of the authorities. And because it was a decision that should not be made without Elizaveta’s say-so.

I was glad to be in the SUV headed away from that charnel house. Adam didn’t say anything—and Sherwood was never exactly a font of words. The only sound for most of the trip was the kitten’s squeaky moans. I’d never heard a cat make that sound before—and I hoped I never did again.

“He’s dying,” said Sherwood, breaking the silence. His attention was on the animal he held on his lap. He sounded casual, but my nose told me better. It didn’t take a psychologist to understand why he’d be concerned with an animal rescued from a witch’s lair.

“He made it this far,” Adam said bracingly, proving that he’d understood Sherwood, too. “It’s just a mile more to the clinic.”

Sherwood pulled the kitten up to his face with big hands that supported its whole body evenly and breathed its scent. “Did you know?” he asked. “About the black magic in that house?” His head tilted away from Adam told both of us how important it was to him.

Adam shook his head. “No. I’d have put a stop to it. I had no idea.”

Sherwood nodded. “And what are we going to do about it?”

“We will do nothing,” Adam said. “This is something for me to do.”

Sherwood studied Adam for a long moment.

“There will be no black magic in my territory,” Adam said softly. He gets quiet when he is very angry.

Sherwood relaxed in his seat.

The kitten survived until we reached the clinic.

I waited behind the very black windows in the SUV while Adam and Sherwood took the kitten in to the emergency vet. I wasn’t advertising what I was—there had been a couple of times that the only reason I survived the bad guys was that they didn’t know I could change into a coyote. The fight with the goblin this morning was a good example.

They came out about a half hour later, looking grim.

Adam told me as he got in the car, “Touch and go. Lots of broken bones, some of them half-healed. Lots of superficial and not so superficial damage. Minor skull fracture. Dehydrated and starving. They have him on IVs and have treated everything they can treat. It’s up to him now.”

“They thought it was us who had tortured the kitten,” said Sherwood.

Adam nodded. “Until a lady in the waiting room recognized me and got so excited. Sometimes the publicity can be useful.”

“There will be headlines,” said Sherwood, sounding more settled now that the cat was out of the car and out of his care. “Werewolves rescue tortured kitten.”

Adam grinned suddenly and said, “Spotlight will be on you this time. That useful lady took a picture when you kissed the kitten’s nose.”

Sherwood snorted. “I posed for her.”

“Sure you did, softy,” Adam said as we pulled out of the parking lot and headed for home. “That photo will be all over the social media sites by morning.”

“Werewolf contemplates dinner,” said Sherwood. “Dinner contemplates werewolf back.” Then the humor left his voice. “I hope he makes it.”

Adam reached out and put his hand on Sherwood’s shoulder. “Whatever happens, we’ve done all that we can.”