“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 the
re 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.
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