Storm Cursed

4

Unusually, there was no one home when we arrived. Our house serves the pack as hotel/hospital/meeting place as well as host to the weekly pirate video game tournament that was the pack’s obsession. Not even Joel’s rescue dog, Cookie, greeted us. Medea was, presumably, around somewhere, but like most cats, she usually didn’t bother to greet her people when they first came in the door. I desperately wanted a shower, but for that I wanted to be in my human shape. I don’t mind wet fur, but the whole process is simpler without it.

Adam went directly to the kitchen and we followed him.

He looked in the fridge, made a growly noise, and said, “I don’t know why I thought there might be leftovers in this house.”

We had werewolves living here. Food did not go to waste.

Adam sighed, opened a cupboard, and said, “Toasted tuna sandwiches it is.”

He sent Sherwood out to the freezer in the garage to grab a couple of loaves of bread, then set him to thawing the bread in the microwave.

Adam made the tuna mixture with the swift economy of someone who knows what it is like to cook for a lot of people. Darryl was our usual cook, but Adam sometimes fed everyone, too. He’d told me once that it satisfied his wolf’s need to care for the pack.

“Two or three?” he asked me as he diced dill pickles.

I yipped twice.

“Three,” he said, grinning when I flattened my ears at him. “When you can talk, you can crab at me. Sherwood?”

“Four,” said Sherwood, pulling one loaf out of the microwave and putting the other one in.

Despite my best intentions of sticking to my guns (if Adam hadn’t planned on listening to me, why did he bother asking?), I ate all three sandwiches—and half of a fourth. Then I tried changing. Adam made more sandwiches.

Sherwood finished his four, then looked at me. He said abruptly, “I need to shower.”

Adam looked up. “Are you okay?”

Sherwood started to nod, but stopped. “I stink like that house—and I have no wish to listen to Mercy revisit what we found there.”

“Go shower,” Adam said. “I have some business to discuss with you and Mercy, but it can wait. I’ll get Mercy’s impressions. When we’re done, I’ll let you know.”

Sherwood nodded, got up from the table, and left. Though there was a shower he could have used upstairs, I heard him take the stairs to the basement.

The downstairs shower was the one the pack usually used if they needed to. We kept a variety of clean clothes in a closet next to the basement bathroom, sweats mostly, but some of the pack kept full changes—so his decision to go downstairs instead of upstairs made all sorts of sense. However, I was pretty sure it would be a day or two before I could go down to any basement, even our own, without trepidation. Sherwood, evidently, was made of sterner stuff.

I ate the other half of the fourth sandwich, two more sandwiches, and two chocolate chip cookies that Adam had apparently secreted in the garage freezer along with the bread. And then I tried changing again.

Usually my change is instantaneous and painless, but sometimes, when I’ve pushed it too far, it sucks. It doesn’t happen often, because there just aren’t that many situations, miniature zombie goats aside, that require me to bounce back and forth between shapes.

It took a subjective hour, probably no more than five or six minutes, but I managed the shift. I lay on the floor panting, too tired to move, and waited for my eyes to focus. How, I wondered, did the werewolves put up with this or worse every change? There were a lot of things that made me happy to be what I was instead of a werewolf.

“Okay, then,” Adam said. “Let’s get you something to wear.” I heard him run up the stairs.

By the time he dumped clean clothes on my stomach, I was sitting up. I was going to need a nap soon, but I wasn’t going to go to our bed smelling like Elizaveta’s house—even a pigsty smells better than black magic. Shower first, nap second. But all that had to wait for the interrogation.

I sorted out the clothes and started to put them on.

“Wait,” Adam said, crouching beside me. He ran a light hand over a tender spot on my shoulder—and I winced.

“Oh,” I said. “That must have been the goblin.” I didn’t remember getting the bruise or scrape Adam had found, but it hadn’t been the goats.

One of the goats had kicked me in the shin, and another had bitten me in the arm. The arm was bruised, but I’d knocked the little goat loose before he’d broken the skin. Getting bitten by a zombie wouldn’t make someone turn into one, I was pretty sure, though getting bitten by something that was dead might result in the mother of all infections. But I knew they hadn’t gotten the shoulder, so that must have happened when I was fighting the goblin.

Adam leaned his forehead against my uninjured shoulder and wrapped his hands around both of my arms. The weight of him was bracing against my back.

“I wish,” he said, his voice muffled a little against my skin, “that you healed as quickly as one of the pack. I wish I didn’t need you to go fight goblins and zombie goats because I am stuck in stupid meetings with idiots.”

“Miniature zombie goats,” I corrected. “Or miniature goat zombies. The ‘miniature’ is important. ‘Zombie goats’ just sound satanic.”

His hands tightened on my upper arms. “I am so grateful that you are quick and smart. That you work at staying alive, Mercy. But I worry that someday that won’t be enough.”

“I worry about you, too,” I told him. “But I would rather worry than try to make you into a . . . an accountant or something.”

My stepfather was a dentist. I had, for years, wondered if part of his appeal to my mother was that he was as unlike the danger-seeking bull rider who had been my father (he had also been Coyote, but she didn’t know that part) as she could find.

Adam laughed, but there wasn’t a lot of humor in it. “For nearly ten years, you led a quiet, blameless life. Danger didn’t visit on a daily basis. I keep looking for the cause. For the reason all hell broke loose in your life. I can’t escape that the impetus might have been me.”

I shook my head firmly. “No. You didn’t start the weird stuff. You were just there to help when bad things began happening. The boy, Mac, who came to my door, that had nothing to do with you.”

Alan MacKenzie Frazier’s appearance had broken a nearly decade-long peace, when I had repaired cars and mostly ignored and been ignored by most of the rest of the supernatural world. Mac had been a ragged harbinger of trouble to come. Poor boy, he’d been dead more than three years.

“If there is a need for someone to blame,” I said, “I choose to blame Coyote. That’s what Gary”—my half brother—“does. He says that nine times in ten he is right. And the one time left over might be Coyote’s fault, too, it’s just that he didn’t leave enough evidence to pin it on him.”

Adam hugged me. “Okay, okay.” He sighed, and there was enough guilt in his sigh that I was pretty sure he didn’t ascribe to my perspective.

He rubbed my arms lightly. “You’re getting goose bumps.” He released me and stood up. “You need to get dressed, tell me all about what you noticed at Elizaveta’s house—”

“Dead people,” I told him.

“—besides dead people,” he continued smoothly. “And then you need to go shower and rest.”

I sighed. “Nope.” Because as the ache of the return to my human self subsided, I realized that a nap was not in my near future. “After my debriefing, I need to shower and head to work. No rest for the wicked.”

He started to say something, then put his hands up in the air. “Okay. But I’ll bring pizza home for dinner.”

Today was my turn to cook.

“Deal,” I said.

He helped me to my feet and I let him. My hands felt clumsy and I was off-balance and had to lean on him to drag on my jeans. My hair smelled horrid—or at least smelled more horrid than the rest of me did. And I kept getting a whiff of Robert. I didn’t want to think about, let alone smell like, Elizaveta’s grandson. I pulled my hair back from my face and rebraided it. It didn’t help much, but at least it wasn’t brushing against my skin every time I moved.

He watched me get dressed with what some people might think was solely an appreciative eye. They just didn’t share a mate bond with Adam. My husband gave the lie to that old adage that men have only one idea in their heads at a time and usually that one thing was sex.

Part of him was cataloging my bruises. Part of him was noticing how wobbly I was. Part of him was worrying about things he couldn’t change. And part of him was thinking about sex.

I gave that part of him a wiggle of my hips, and he laughed.

“Hey,” he said. “No fair teasing when you know if you made it to horizontal, you’d be asleep before I got to first base.”

I stuck my tongue out at him.

“Careful,” he warned. “Or someone will take you up on your offer.” Then, with a quick, rueful smile, he switched gears. “So what did you find at Elizaveta’s?”

“What were you looking for?” I asked as I buttoned my jeans.

I pulled my shirt over my head instead of unbuttoning it, then paid for that bit of laziness with having to struggle when one of the shirtsleeves wouldn’t turn out properly.

Adam helped me get untangled. “Just tell me whatever you noticed.”

“Well, you know about the black magic, obviously,” I said. “It was all of them. All of the dead people were black practitioners—even Militza.”

No wonder Jesse had gotten a funny feeling about her. Maybe if she’d kept giving Militza rides, though, we’d have discovered what had been going on in our own backyard.

“What do you think about Elizaveta?” he asked. “Could she have lived in that house, with all of her family practicing black magic, and still be a gray witch?”

I shrugged. “Maybe? I don’t know about how witches operate on quite that intimate a detail. But she didn’t. Didn’t avoid it. Is that what you wanted me to find out?” That’s why he’d asked me if I could distinguish one witch’s magic from another’s. I hadn’t actually had to do that—Elizaveta’s confession had been in her bedroom.

He nodded, his face tight. He’d expected that answer, but he’d hoped for a different one.

“I don’t know how she hid it from us,” I told him, or maybe told myself. “I swear she doesn’t smell or feel like a black witch, Adam. But when I went snooping in her bedroom, there was a secret compartment in her closet.”

It had been the most interesting thing I’d found upstairs. The cubby had been well hidden, too. But it’s difficult to keep a compartment secret when it is often used and the person who is searching has the nose of a coyote.

“Did Sherwood vet that compartment before you opened it?” Adam asked sharply.

I waved a hand in reassurance. “Yes, of course he did. My guess is that she didn’t booby-trap it because she uses it too often. She keeps her working clothes there.” She’d washed the blood out but I could still smell it—blood and other things. I hoped that my hair would wash cleaner than Elizaveta’s shirt. “They smelled like death, those clothes. Like pain and rot.”

“Black magic,” Adam acknowledged with something like defeat. “F . . . Freaking son of a gun. Could they have belonged to someone else?”

“In her room?” I asked, but shook my head. “No. They also smelled like her.”

“How did she hide it from me?” Adam asked.

I didn’t think he was asking me, but I answered anyway. “She is a witch, Adam. I expect she used magic.” I swayed a little on my feet. The food had helped, but it needed a little more time to have the full effect. I’d be okay in a bit.

“I’m not an expert,” I told him. “I didn’t know they could do that—hide black magic from our senses. But she did it somehow, and she’s a witch. Makes sense it would be witchcraft. But it’s a guess.”

Adam steadied me with a hand on my back, avoiding the sore places. “Sorry, Mercy. I know you’re exhausted, but there is more that we need to go over.”

“I’m fine,” I told him. “Or I’ll be fine in a half hour or so. But if we’re going to have a drawn-out conversation, right this minute, then I need to sit down.”

Adam pulled a chair out from the table and plunked me down on it.

“The black magic is new, right?” I asked him. “Before we got together, when her house was in town, she’d have you and Jesse over for dinner sometimes. I don’t care how good she is, she couldn’t have hidden that—” Greasy cloud of magic—but the werewolves wouldn’t have felt that. “—odor that permeated the house from you.”

Adam sat next to me, absently taking my hand in his and playing with my fingers. I liked it when he touched me like that, without thought, as though there were some magnetic force between us. The only thing better was that I could touch him, whenever I wished.

Thoughtfully he said, “Right. I never even noticed when that feeling that she was a part of our pack stopped. Before we got together, for sure.”

He thought about it some more, then grunted. “Whatever she’s doing to cover up her foray into black magic, it’s powerful stuff because . . . well, just think of all the people who were on that airplane on the way to Europe. She hid it from all of us.”

“Passive magic,” I agreed. “Because I’d have noticed anything active. Some kind of charm? If you want to know how, I think you’re going to have to find an expert.”

But how Elizaveta had hidden what she’d become wasn’t at the top of his to-do list. Adam looked out the window and gripped my hand.

When he spoke it was soft with hurt. “I wonder when she . . . changed. And why.”

He liked Elizaveta. She charmed and teased him. She spoke Russian to him, like his mother had. Despite being clear-eyed about what even gray witches did to keep their power, he’d thought of Elizaveta as family, or something near to it. Adam didn’t give up on the people he cared about easily or without pain.

“Maybe it was when that sorcerer vampire scared her,” I suggested softly after a minute, when he didn’t say anything more. I hoped that if we could figure out a reason, then Adam would hurt less. “Remember? He scared her enough that she left town until he was gone.”

Sorcerers are possessed by demons, and those demons can control people who have given up following a path of goodness. That included gray witches, and certainly included black witches.

He shook his head. “No, back then I was in and out of her house a lot. So were the rest of the pack. It was almost a second HQ, because it was in town and more central than our house is. Her switch to black magic couldn’t have gone back more than a year or so.”

I’d never been inside Elizaveta’s house, either house, before. She didn’t like me much, and I was afraid of her. The combination, as I’ve observed before, did not make us friends.

“I’ve never been in her new place before today,” he said. “I’ll ask the pack and see if anyone has been in her new house, but I don’t think so. We gave her some space right after she moved, and never quite regained our old relationship.”

“She moved last year, right? Just before Christmas.”

The timing was interesting. It would have been difficult to work black magic with neighbors too close. Mundane humans wouldn’t necessarily feel the magic—though that isn’t always true—but black magic produces bodies and also smells and sounds. Things that are easier to hide when the neighbors are more distant.

“That’s right,” he agreed. “I’m following you. Maybe she had to move when she slid from gray to black magic. She picked up her whole family—because the adults mostly had their own places before then—and took them out to the country where people might not notice they were burying a lot of dead animals.”

I tried to remember what had been going on around Christmastime. Not because I cared about finding Elizaveta an excuse. Black practitioners tortured and killed unwilling prey. As far as I was concerned, Elizaveta was anathema from this point forward and I didn’t need anything more than that. I’d seen those dead animals in cages. I’d probably see them again in my nightmares.

But Adam might feel better with a reason.

“Right after Thanksgiving, that necromancer vampire challenged Marsilia—Frost,” I said before I thought. If I’d been thinking, I wouldn’t have mentioned Frost.

His mouth tightened. Frost was a sore point. I’d been maneuvered into fighting beside Marsilia against Frost in a sort of vampire shoot-out. Frost could command the dead—and so could I, sort of. Marsilia had thought that pulling me onto her team would give her a better chance. Adam needed to get over it because I would have killed Frost if Adam hadn’t done it first. Probably. Maybe.

“Do you think Frost might have scared Elizaveta?” I asked.

“Scared me,” he said. “I don’t ever want to see you fighting a vampire again, Mercy, any vampire. That was too damned close.”

Okay, I needed to redirect this conversation because my rules were that he only got to chew on me one time per incident. And he’d already had his say about Frost.

“We were talking about Elizaveta,” I told him. “Would he have scared Elizaveta?”

He snorted at me, but answered the question. “She doesn’t have much to do with vampires.” Then his face grew serious. “You told me that necromancy is a rare talent for a vampire.”

“One of the vampires told me that,” I agreed. I’d relayed that information to Adam so he wouldn’t think that Marsilia would be likely to volunteer me to fight more of her rivals anytime soon. “It’s why Frost was so powerful.”

“Necromancy is more properly a witch thing, right?” Adam said. Then he shook his head and said again, “Elizaveta doesn’t have much to do with the vampires. I don’t think she ever met Frost.” He frowned. “But if he was witchborn, maybe she sensed something . . . It wouldn’t be an excuse for what we found at her house, but it would be an explanation.”

“When you talked to her,” I said, “what did she say when you asked her about the black magic?”

Adam sighed. “I didn’t. She would know that I understood what she’d been doing. But I think we both decided that was a conversation best not held over a transatlantic phone call.” He was the one who decided to change the conversation this time. “When was the first time you saw Frost?”

“When he tried that coup on Marsilia,” I said. “Um. Two years ago? Okay, right. That means it can’t have been Frost. Elizaveta didn’t meet him when he was here in November. And if she knew about him by some other means, that would have happened a long time ago.”

“If his power was witchborn,” Adam said, “Elizaveta would have known when he entered the Tri-Cities the first time. She has ways. So the timing isn’t right. At least if all she is responding to is his mere presence. Frost didn’t cause her to turn.”

He shrugged off the search for the answer to “why” and focused back on more immediate events.

“Who did you scent in the house?”

“All of the dead, Elizaveta, two strange witches—and I think, faintly in an upstairs bedroom, that missing man that we were helping the police look for two months ago—the guy with Alzheimer’s.”

Adam nodded. “Zack and Darryl caught that, too.” He looked away for a moment. “She helped us search for him, too, remember? I should have seen what was going on before this.”

“How?” I asked him. “She was hiding from you, Adam. That’s something she’s very good at.”

After a moment, he said, “So you only picked up two strange witches, also. Black witches.” I nodded. “And Elizaveta and her whole clan are . . . were black-magic practitioners. Did you find anything else?”

“A few things,” I told him. “And I don’t know what to make of them. Everyone in the house died at exactly the same time.”

“How do you know that?” But before I could answer, he snapped the fingers of his free hand, the one not touching me. “Ghosts.”

I shook my head. “They are all over in that house, but I didn’t get anything coherent out of them. Trauma might make for strong ghosts, but it doesn’t always make them good communicators.”

“So how did you know they all died at the same time?” Adam asked.

I frowned, because I wasn’t happy about this. “I just knew, Adam. I could feel it in that house—that life just stopped being possible in a single moment, and everything died.”

He grunted unhappily, which is how I felt. I did not like knowing that there was a witch out there who could do something like that. Fourteen people and dozens of animals died under her magic. If she could do that to a house full of witches, could she do it to a house full of werewolves?

I also did not like knowing how strongly I’d felt the moment of their death. I was beginning to understand how closely Coyote was connected to the transition between life and death—Coyote was the spirit of change, after all. The implications for me were unsettling.

Moving right along, then. “There were a lot of ghosts in that house,” I told him. “If you dig on her land, I bet you’ll turn up human remains along with the animals. More than just the gentleman with Alzheimer’s.”

He grimaced. “That’s something we’ll figure out when Elizaveta gets back.”

“Did she have any theory about who might have done this?” I asked.

He shook his head, then shrugged. “Someone trying to take over her territory while she was away.”

Frost was sort of in my head because of our earlier discussion. And he’d come to the Tri-Cities to take over Marsilia’s territory. And then my subconscious, which had evidently been plodding along most of the morning, finally connected a few dots.

Adam frowned at me. “Mercy?”

“Huh,” I said. “Frost.”

“What?” Adam asked.

“I just figured out who the witch that made those zombies smelled like,” I told him. “You know how scents are, after a while it takes a bit of jogging to remember when you smelled someone before.”

“Yes,” Adam said.

I nodded. “I knew that she smelled like someone I’d scented before. But I kept running through the witches I’ve met—there haven’t actually been all that many—and came up blank. But the parts of her that didn’t smell like black magic and witch smelled like Frost. Enough like him to be a close relative, sibling, child—even parent. But no further removed than that.”

“Huh.” Adam made the same noise I had, sounding unusually nonplussed. Then he seemed to gather himself together.

“Frost,” he said. “Do you think that this attack had something to do with vampires?”

“Or,” I said slowly, “maybe the whole Frost thing had something to do with witches.”

He pulled his hand free and used both hands to rub his face tiredly. He hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in nearly a week. Me, either, actually.

“Terrific,” he said. “Just what we need right now, a witch-maybe-vampire territorial dispute.”

“I’ve given you my current conspiracy theory,” I told him. “Maybe it is a coincidence?”

“But it makes me go hmm,” he said.

I leaned my head on his shoulder. “Sorry.”

“Not your fault,” he said. After a moment he said, “Did you hear Sherwood turn on the water?”

“No,” I said, sitting up. If Sherwood had taken a shower, we should have heard it. “Sherwood?” I called his name. He was a werewolf; he should hear me easily.

There was no reply.

“I can’t reach him through the pack bonds,” Adam said, getting out of his chair and heading toward the basement. “He’s there, but I can’t contact him.”

Adam didn’t run, but he didn’t waste any time, either. At the top of the stairs, he stopped and held up a hand for me to pause, too.

The basement was quiet, too quiet, and dark. Now that I was looking for it, I could feel magic at work. I would have sworn there had been nothing there when Sherwood had headed down. Come to think of it, Sherwood, unlike most werewolves, was sensitive to witchcraft—and this was witchcraft. If it had been there, he’d never have gone down.

Adam started down the stairs, but I grabbed the back of his jeans. He could see the darkness and hear the silence, but he couldn’t feel what I could.

“Wait up,” I whispered. “There’s a lot of magic right here on the stairs.”

Adam turned and gave me a quick kiss. “Mercy,” he said in a normal voice. “Neither you nor I can do anything about the magic, and one of my wolves is on the other side.”

I released him. “When you put it like that . . .”

He continued down, and I followed. As his foot hit the fourth step down, inky shadow boiled up, like a weird, black, dry-ice fog. Adam didn’t even hesitate. I put a hand on his back as he waded into the darkness ahead of me.

Maybe I should have stayed upstairs where I could have called for help if no one came back up. But he hadn’t asked me to do that, and I wasn’t going to suggest it. One of our wolves was trapped down there.

I knew when we came to the bottom of the stairs because I was counting, and because Adam stopped abruptly. He snarled and the muscles under my hand tightened to rock-hard as he put pressure on whatever lay in front of him.

“Blocked,” he grunted.

“Let me try,” I said, slipping by him.

The barrier that had stopped him felt like a giant warm cushion blocking the way. It tried to keep me out, as it had Adam, but everywhere it pressed against me, it softened and yielded. Going forward felt like I was voluntarily suffocating myself in warm wax that slid into my ears and nose and required almost more bravery than I possessed. But Adam had my back, and that knowledge combined with Sherwood’s need kept me moving forward.

I shut my mouth before any of the nasty, witchcrafted jelly goop could invade my mouth as well. I grabbed Adam’s hand as I struggled forward, hoping I could pull him in my wake.

It wasn’t easy or quick, but I made progress. Cool air touched the top of my head, and then I could hear the furious roar of Sherwood’s wolf as the warm, insidious magic slid reluctantly away.

As soon as my nostrils were free, I could scent black magic and . . . a strange werewolf whose scent was overlaid with something I’d smelled a lot today. I didn’t dare open my eyes until my lids were clear of the barrier, but my nose told me enough.

We had a zombie werewolf in the basement.

I’d leaned forward, so my upper body cleared the barrier first, which meant I was trapped from the waist down and blind when there was a zombie werewolf less than thirty feet away.

I wiped at my face with my free hand, pushing aside the magic until it felt safe to open my eyes. My legs were still stuck in slow motion, but at least I could see.

This zombie was different from the goats, better made. His black coat didn’t exactly glisten with health, but it wasn’t ragged, either. Hard to tell for sure, with both combatants moving so fast, but I thought the zombie wolf was a little bigger than Sherwood, which would put it in the same size category as Samuel or Charles. If it hadn’t been for the smell, I might have believed that it was a living werewolf.

The goats I’d dealt with this morning had been driven by one purpose: to feed. That had made them easy to hunt because they had been blind and deaf to anything else. But this dead wolf fought with intelligence and training.

Sherwood was missing one back leg—which was annoying, I’m sure, even in his human shape. But it was a huge liability in a fight where he was a wolf, as he was now. He compensated for the lack with tactics, forcing his opponent to move into his space, where his hampered maneuverability wasn’t such a problem.

Outside of Adam, I don’t think there would have been a wolf in the pack who could have taken Sherwood if he’d had four legs. But he was losing his battle against the zombie.

“Mechanical damage,” I yelled to Sherwood, as if he needed my help. With my newly acquired experience with zombies, I continued more quietly, “They don’t feel pain. So you have to do mechanical damage. Getting you some help in a minute.”

I redoubled my struggle to get my legs free without losing my balance. I pulled my left foot out, turned, and reached back into the barrier and locked my free hand on Adam’s, so I could haul with both of my hands. I wasn’t going to be a lot of help with a zombie werewolf—we needed Adam.

Pulling him through was like a game of tug-of-war. I made progress, but it was unholy slow. At some point in the process, my left foot came free. In helping Adam, I’d reburied my face in the muck. I couldn’t see Adam, just felt the grip of his hands in mine as we both strained to pull him through.

There was a terrible moment when I thought it wasn’t going to work—that both of us were just going to suffocate in the blasted barrier. Then finally, with a vast, horrid sucking sound and a zing that went through me like that time I touched an electric fence in the rain, the spell was gone.

Adam stumbled forward, pulled off-balance by the sudden lack of resistance. But he regained his footing almost immediately, his attention on the fight. I dropped his hand and stepped back, gasping for air, as he stripped off his clothes and called on the pack bonds to quicken his change. But he didn’t wait for it to take him before he waded into the fray.

Even with the help of the bonds, it would take him five or ten minutes to change. He might have been better off staying human—but he didn’t have any weapons and we didn’t keep any down here.

“Zombies,” I muttered, staring at the dead wolf who fought like a demon. “What do I know about zombies?”

Since the magic was gone from the stairs, I bolted up them to the main floor, then paused.

“Burn zombies,” I muttered. “Behead them.” I had visions of a dozen horror movies with moving body parts, but I couldn’t remember what part of that lore was fiction. I wished we’d experimented a bit with the miniature goat zombies. It would be helpful right now to know if beheading would work. Burning a zombie while we were all in the basement seemed like a doubtfully useful thing. If I succeed in dousing it with enough lighter fluid to actually catch the flesh on fire, there was a good chance that I’d catch everyone and everything else on fire. And no matter what caught on fire, thanks to Aiden and Joel we had a dandy fire suppression system in the house. Beheading seemed the better option with my limited knowledge.

I ran up the second flight of steps toward our bedroom instead of running to the barbecue supplies in the garage. The kitchen knives had been closer, but only a few seconds closer and they weren’t big enough.

Adam had a gun safe in the walk-in closet and a locked wardrobe filled with other kinds of weapons. I regretted my cutlass—left in the trunk of my car, which was at Elizaveta’s house awaiting one of the pack to drive it home. But there were a lot of sharp and pointy things in the wardrobe.

The first thing I saw in the weapons store was the .444 Marlin. I’d almost forgotten; we’d run out of room in the gun safe and put the Marlin in the weapons store instead.

In the basement, I didn’t have to worry about killing innocent bystanders with the gun designed to shoot Kodiak bears. The lipstick-sized bullets might even give a zombie trouble.

No time to dither. I grabbed the rifle, which we kept loaded, with my left hand and grabbed a random sword in my right. I was back in the hallway when I realized what weapon I’d grabbed. Peter’s saber.

Peter had been one of our wolves. His German cavalry saber had been at our house when he died—he had brought it over to demonstrate something to one of the other wolves. Or maybe that had been when he was teaching Jesse how to fight with a sword. Honey, his mate, had not taken it back—though she knew where it was.

German steel was more forgiving than the steel of the five katanas that also hung in that closet—it would flex where a katana might shatter. That was the only thing it had going for it as far as I was concerned. It was a heavy cavalry saber.

I’d handled katanas for years and switched to the even shorter, lighter cutlass. But a cavalry sword was designed to be wielded from horseback, as much hatchet as blade, and this one was built for a man who had been taller and stronger than I was. It was better than a kitchen knife.

At least I had the .444.

My foot hit the top step of the stairs to the main floor less than a full minute after I’d run up from the basement. I’d kept a count in my head. Fifty-three seconds is a long time in a real battle. People die in seconds. Heartbeats. I took comfort from the bestial sounds coming from the basement and the burning of the pack bonds. If Adam was drawing upon them still to hasten his change, he was alive.

Then silence fell.

I paused halfway down the upper stairway.

The zombie werewolf cleared the top of the basement stairway and stopped. It looked around as if searching for something. I dropped the sword so I could use the rifle.

The sound drew its attention, and it jumped across the space between the basement stairs and the ones I stood on top of and headed up.

I shot it, twice, as fast as I could work the action on the rifle. The Marlin kicked like a mule, and even the ported barrel didn’t make up for the fact that the gun was relatively light and the bullet was huge. I should have waited on the second shot and I knew it even as my finger pulled the trigger. It only carried five bullets and I’d just wasted one.

But my first shot had taken it in the chest. I had been aiming for the forehead, but the zombie was moving fast. The bullet knocked it back, rolling it down about five steps and onto the space between the staircases before it caught its balance again.

Ears ringing with the cannonlike bellow of the rifle, I drew a deep breath, reminded myself I needed to cause mechanical damage, and hit the wolf’s front left leg with the third bullet, as it attempted my stairs again. Because of the porting of the barrel, the muzzle flash from the Marlin was over two feet long and, for some weird reason, explainable only by battlefield conditions because a muzzle flash doesn’t do anything, that reassured me.

The next shot took the bottom of its jaw off, but the next and last bullet went into the wall when the wolf moved faster than I’d seen it move before and swiped the end of the rifle barrel.

I let it go—I was out of bullets anyway—and the rifle hit the wall with a noise that left me pretty sure that weapon wasn’t going to be useful ever again. But I was too busy dodging a swipe of the wicked-sharp claws to mourn my long-dead foster father’s rifle. That swipe had more in common with a bear’s attack than a timber wolf’s. If it hit me, it could kill me with a single blow.

I leaped for the sword and stabbed the wolf with the reflexes I’d been working on since well before I’d been gifted with my cutlass. I’d executed the move smoothly, and if I’d been using my cutlass or a katana, it would have slid into its heart.

But Peter’s sword was a freaking cavalry saber and the tip was heavier than I was used to—and the tip and the handle were not in line. The only thing my sword thrust did was release a vile-smelling stream of effluvia all over the white carpet. And then it got stuck in the zombie.

I didn’t bother trying to hold on to the sword. Instead I leaped over it, over the railing of the stairwell, landing right on the edge of the first step of the basement stairway.

The zombie had a little trouble turning . . . but I saw to my horror that it was healing the damage I’d done. Its destroyed leg wasn’t bearing weight yet, but it no longer hung from the shoulder. And when it bared its fangs at me, the lower jaw I’d all but shot off was fully functional.

It was healing itself faster than a werewolf could. That wasn’t something the miniature goat zombies had done.

The zombie followed my jump, but betrayed by the bad leg, it fell badly when it landed and struggled to get to its feet. It acted as though it hadn’t yet realized that one of its front legs wasn’t working.

I scrambled into the kitchen and grabbed a knife out of the block and turned to face the zombie, but it hadn’t followed me. I heard a battle by the stairs and ran back until I could see what was going on.

Adam had stopped the zombie werewolf from following me. There was fresh blood all over my mate, but like the zombie, he had already healed most of the damage. He was still changing, and if he’d healed as much damage as it looked like, he’d been drawing heavily from the pack to do so. That was probably why the pack bond felt like it was on fire.

I wondered where the zombie was getting its power from.

It saw me and lunged. Adam grabbed the dead wolf by its shoulder and ripped it (literally, because its claws were dug into the carpet) away from me. The creature fell all the way to the foot of the stairs and . . .

Magic hit me, as it had earlier this morning when the goblin had flung his magic around. This power surged from the bottom of my feet and traveled up my body in a shock so hard that for an instant, every muscle in my body locked up with painful intensity in a giant, hellish charley horse–like cramp and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stand, couldn’t think. When that subsided and I drew in a first, panicked breath, I smelled ozone, as if I’d been too close to a lightning strike.

I collapsed in a heap on the ground and my body vibrated to even more magic, gentler magic this time that my senses wanted to interpret as music, a wild wailing sound of grief and rage echoing through my flesh and not my ears.

And then it was over. I scrambled instinctively to my feet—the floor is a terrible place to be in a fight. Adam stuck his side against me so that I didn’t go right back down to the floor.

The last I’d seen Adam, his body had been poised to follow the zombie down the stairs. Evidently my weird reaction had kept him upstairs.

“I don’t know,” I told his worried eyes breathlessly. “Some big magic.” I rubbed my arms.

There was a scraping noise from the basement.

We both looked down the stairs, but the zombie was nowhere to be seen—though I could certainly still smell him. There was a puddle of the same foul, squishy liquid muck that Peter’s sword had extracted in the carpet at the foot of the stairs. Something big had been dragged through it.

“Sherwood?” I called.

The sound of his growl should have reassured me.

Adam’s ears flattened. He glanced at me.

“Okay,” I said reluctantly.

So I waited while my mate went down the stairs to see what had happened.