Storm Cursed

by Patricia Briggs

  “Hush now, miscreants,” I said. “We’re hunting witches.”

  Tad, doubtless hearing the edge of utter terror that I was trying to cover up with humor, ruffled my hair. “We’ve got your back.”

  “So do the zombies,” said Wulfe in a whisper that sent the hairs on the back of my neck climbing right onto the top of my head.

  “Shut up, Wulfe,” I said. “I’m scared enough.”

  “No,” Wulfe said, a little sadly or possibly a little smugly, “I don’t think you are.”

  After that optimistic observation, we all lapsed into silence.

  We could have approached from the front. Wulfe pointed out that they doubtless would have alarms all around the property. If Elizaveta had really gone over to their side, they might even have access to several circles of her protections. No, I didn’t know exactly what that meant, other than it was a bad thing.

  But we voted three to one to approach from the rear—which had us traipsing through someone else’s property before we marched onto Elizaveta’s hayfield. After ten minutes of stumbling through the neighbor’s alfalfa field, I was pretty sure that Wulfe had been right, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.

  Zee finally put a hand under my elbow. The old fae trod through the rough ground as if it were a flat field in daylight. Wulfe and Tad just ghosted through, too. I could have made a better show as a coyote—but that would have meant leaving my weaponry behind.

  The first circle, we discovered, was halfway through Elizaveta’s neighbor’s field.

  “Huh,” said Wulfe, from somewhere ahead of me.

  “Hold up,” said Tad.

  Zee stopped and I did, too.

  Wulfe turned his head, looking at something I couldn’t see.

  “That’s well done,” he said. “There’s a ward circle here.” He swept a hand ahead of him. “Well, not really a circle, more of a square—but that’s okay for something like this. Just a warning line. She’d have felt every squirrel or coyote”—he didn’t look at me—“that ran across it, but still . . .”

  “She?” I asked.

  “This is Elizaveta’s work,” Wulfe said. “What does it say that she has activated it?”

  “Not much,” said Zee. “We can speculate, of course. Perhaps she has joined forces with them. Or perhaps they found the key to the house protections when they held Elizaveta’s family.”

  “Yeah,” said Wulfe with theatrical sadness. “It doesn’t tell us much.” He scuffed his toe into the ground with exaggerated disappointment. In a five-year-old it would have been cute. In a very scary vampire it was . . . cute.

  He bent down and drew a line in the dirt with his finger about two feet long. “If you will all step over the border right here?”

  We did, and he brushed the marks out with his fingers.

  Wulfe continued to take point. Ostensibly, this was so that he could keep an eye out for the kinds of things that we could not. Truthfully, there was no way I would have been able to let him trail behind me when I couldn’t keep track of where he was. I don’t think I was alone in that feeling.

  It was Zee who held a hand up the next time. “Witch,” he said in a soft murmur, his attention focused ahead of us, “can you keep a battle quiet?”

  I felt it, too. The feeling of wrongness that I was beginning to associate with zombies.

  Wulfe frowned. “All of the zombies are confined to the yard,” he said.

  “Evidently not,” said Zee. “Witch, keep this quiet if you can. Boy, draw your weapon. Mercy—do not try to shoot or stab this one. Your blade is fine, but it is not one of mine. It will not penetrate an ogre’s hide.”

  Wulfe raised an eyebrow either in mild offense at the gruff order or in mild surprise at the knowledge that the zombie ogre was around, but he closed his eyes and began moving his hands in patterns. His fingers, I noted, were flexible, like a pianist’s—even on the hand that I’d seen Stefan cut off.

  Subtle magic infused the air and the atmosphere attained that odd hollow quality that I associated with the full moon dance. Pack magic sealed the sound on such nights so that only the wolves and their prey could hear the howls of the hunt.

  The ogre stepped out of the shadows, shadows that hadn’t been there because we were out in an open field where there was nothing but knee-deep alfalfa, carrying an eight-foot-long wooden fence post in one beefy hand. It brought the post smashing down on Wulfe—who took two steps to the side without ceasing his magic-making.

  I had never seen an ogre in its real form before. I’d met one at Uncle Mike’s, but I’d only ever seen her in her human guise—tall, slim, and disapproving of the chaos of the birthday party we’d been celebrating. Tad’s fourteenth, as I recalled.

  This ogre was eight feet tall and weighed in at probably four hundred to five hundred pounds. A stiff ruff of bright orange hair ringed its neck and then rose up the back of its head, giving the appearance of a cross between a Mohawk and the crest of a cockatoo. There were seams in its skin, tidily stitched up. One ran across its forehead. One looped its left arm—and as soon as I noted that, I could see that its left arm was a little longer and the wisps of hair growing on the forearm were dark brown. Stitches ringed both legs just below the knee . . . right where Sherwood’s leg had been taken off, I thought with a chill.

  That pet who had killed the master-zombie maker that Wulfe had been so disturbingly impressed with. I wondered if it had been a werewolf.

  Like, presumably, Wulfe’s stolen zombie, this one had no smell of rot. If I hadn’t had the past couple of weeks to get a good taste of what zombies smell like, I wasn’t sure I’d have picked the ogre out as a zombie. And it had used magic to conceal itself.

  Mindful of Zee’s assessment of my capabilities, I drew my cutlass but took up a stance just behind and to the left of Wulfe.

  “Always happy to shield a lady,” said Wulfe, a little breathlessly.

  “I figure that when it’s occupied smashing you to jelly, I might get a lucky shot at its eye,” I responded. “I don’t care how tough a creature is, I’ve never seen one shake off a cutlass in its eye.”

  “Okay,” said Wulfe cheerfully. “Happy to oblige by distracting the ogre with my grisly remains.”

  After that first attack, though, the ogre didn’t get another chance at Wulfe. I’d seen Zee fight before. And I’d seen Tad. But I’d never seen them fight together, armed with their favorite weapons.

  It hurt a little. Somewhere in my head, I had Tad pictured, always, as the bright-eyed, brash, and self-assured little boy who’d run his father’s garage by himself for weeks. His mother had just died from cancer and his father, the immortal smith, had tried to drink himself to oblivion. Tad was capable, cheery, confident—and ten years old in my head, until that fight.

  He had a pair of hatchets, one in each hand, and a bigger axe strapped to his back. The tunic rippled light so it was difficult to keep track of him, so I mostly saw him in snatches of still movement—midleap six feet in the air throwing one of the hatchets. That hatchet ended up in the ogre’s left elbow. The next time I caught a glimpse of him, he was rolling on the ground to get beneath the stroke of that big fence post. He was beautiful and deadly—and decidedly not an innocent, if competent, ten-year-old boy.

  If Tad was shadow, then Zee was sunlight. His sword blazed orange and red and hissed as it drew dark lines on the ogre’s skin, howled when it slid through flesh and bone. Zee didn’t drop his glamour, and it would have been odd for someone who didn’t know who and what he was to see an old man moving with such grace and power. He didn’t appear to move fast or use any particular effort. He’d step back and the fence post would slide by his face—not by inches but by millimeters. He simply moved his hand and his sword would cut through the ogre’s knee joint as if it were cheese, leaving the ogre’s severed flesh burning sullenly on both sides of the cut.

  It was a
n amazing, beautiful, fearful dance and it didn’t take them a full minute to disable and then, with a smooth, full-bodied swing of the deadly blazing sword, behead the ogre. Zee’s sword quit blazing and left us in a darkness that seemed darker than before he’d drawn his weapon.

  Wulfe stepped forward and touched the body, pulling out a tuft of the red bristle. He spoke a few words and then planted the hair in the ground.

  “She’ll not know it’s gone for a while,” Wulfe said. “My wards kept her from feeling its demise and this will keep its leash from springing back to her. But if she looks for it, she’ll know it’s gone.”

  “The ogre clans in Scotland had a young one go missing a few centuries back,” murmured Zee. “I’ll let them know that we found him and gave him release.”

  I don’t know how anyone else was affected by that fight. Zee seemed, if anything, more somber. Tad’s battle alertness precluded me reading anything else off him. And Wulfe, Wulfe was himself. But I felt a little more hopeful at the evidence of my comrades’ capabilities. Anyone who could kill a zombie ogre might not be hopeless against a pair of witches, right?

  * * *

  • • •

  Elizaveta’s boundary fence was marked by a row of poplars thick enough to block her neighbors’ observation. It also kept us from having a good view of anything happening near the house.

  “There’s a fire over there,” said Tad softly. “In the backyard, I think.”

  He was right. The light flickering through the trees had too much movement in it to be coming from a lightbulb.

  “Elizaveta had a firepit built in the center of her patio in the backyard,” I said. The patio was large, the size of half of a basketball court, which was what its previous owners had used it for. The basketball hoop was still there, but the firepit made future basketball games unlikely.

  I could smell a bit of smoke and some burned things that weren’t anything I’d scented in a campfire. But there was something wrong. This close, the scent should have been a lot stronger.

  “Fire is a good aid to magic of any kind,” Zee commented. “Perhaps they are trying to work something now?”

  Wulfe closed his eyes and raised a hand—the one that Stefan had cut off—palm out toward Elizaveta’s house.

  “I don’t know what they are doing at the moment,” he said. “But they aren’t keeping a leash on their dead things. They’ve just let them wander inside the circle Elizaveta laid around the place.” He tutted. “Careless of them. Wait up a minute.”

  There was a rush of magic that fluttered by me like a storm of tree leaves. A much more powerful burst of magic than I’d ever felt from him, so I was able to get a better sense of his magic than I had before. It did not smell like black witchcraft . . . or gray witchcraft, either. It smelled clean as the driven snow.

  Wulfe was a white witch?

  It boggled my mind. I’d seen him torture and kill with my own two eyes. I expected gray. Black magic I’d have noticed, but gray magic doesn’t actually smell that different from vampire magic.

  As a vampire, he could coax willing cooperation from any human he fed from. I’d seen him do it. I’d seen them beg him to torture them (there are a lot of reasons Wulfe is at the top of my scary monster chart). He didn’t need to use black magic if he didn’t want to.

  I just hadn’t expected him not to use dark magic at all. It didn’t seem in keeping with the vampire I knew him to be.

  “I’ve sent her creatures to . . . well, not sleep, they don’t sleep. But I’ve made them settle. They won’t notice us as we pass. She’ll have to call them to her to get them up and moving.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “I could just break her hold. Then she couldn’t send them after us, but the circle wouldn’t hold them in. They could go on a killing spree and you’d be weeks hunting all of them down. It might be fun.”

  “A disaster,” said Zee. “Keep them in and let Tad and me hunt them. We’ll keep them off you.”

  Wulfe pursed his lips, then nodded. “Okeydokey. We’ll leave them be, then. But you should know that some of the zombies are very near the back of Elizaveta’s house—probably in the presence of the witches.”

  In the car, he’d promised that he could quiet the zombies without any of the witches knowing what he’d done. But maybe he hadn’t expected them to be so near the witches.

  “Will they have felt what you did?” I asked.

  “Nah,” he said. “But they might notice that the beasties are unresponsive and wake them back up before we’re ready for them.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Can you get me across the circle without alerting the witches?”

  My part in our plans was that I would scout out whatever the witches were doing, come back, and make a report. Then we’d work out what to do from there.

  “Think so,” he said. “Maybe. Ish.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Good to know.”

  And I stripped down to my skin, dropping weapons to one side and clothing to the other.

  “Ni-ice,” said Wulfe in a tone that would have made Adam take off his head. “Hey, is that a wolf’s paw print or a coyote’s below your belly button?”

  It was really dark out. If he was seeing my paw-print tattoo, then his night vision was as good as any wolf’s. He was a vampire, so I should have expected it.

  I am not shy. Shapeshifters—werewolves or coyote shifters like me—get over things like modesty very quickly. But knowing Wulfe was staring at my tattoo made me feel vulnerable. If I were never naked where he could see me again, it would be too soon.

  “Yes,” I told him.

  I shifted into my coyote as quickly as I could.

  Wulfe dropped to all fours at the same time. “Follow me,” he said, and crawled through the fence and into the trees.

  With no choice, I followed him. Just on the other side of the trees, Wulfe put a hand out, with odd deliberation, in front of him, and then did the same with the other hand. Then he straightened his knees until he was in a London Bridge kind of arch.

  “You can run over the top of me or under me,” he said. “I’m keeping the connection of the spell going—so don’t cut me in half or it will sound an alarm.”

  Unwilling to have him on top of me, I ran over the top of him. He settled down on the ground without moving his hands. “Remember to come back this way,” he said. “I’ll be here. Waiting for you.” He batted his eyelashes at me and mouthed, Only you.

  I put Wulfe behind me every which way I could and concentrated on traveling unseen. I didn’t make the mistake of running. Quick movement attracts the attention of prey and predator alike. I found a game trail that smelled of coyote and headed, more or less, in the direction I wanted.

  Traveling down the trail meant less noise—and I wouldn’t be moving grass around. But it would also be a place that traps could be set and patrols run. The zombies were, hopefully, quiescent, but Adam wouldn’t be affected. When trying to hide, running right down the road was always the wrong decision. Except that a game trail wasn’t exactly a road. Decisions, decisions.

  Decisions with Adam’s life on the line. And the senator’s. It wasn’t that I wasn’t concerned about him. We were, our pack, obliged legally and ethically to make sure he was safe. I didn’t love the senator, however. And I was pretty sure that freeing Adam of the witch’s spell—Wulfe had a harrowing suggestion on that—would make the senator safer, too.

  I decided to chance it, and took the trail. I passed by a few of the witch’s zombies as I skulked toward the house. The first was a squirrel. I don’t know that I’d have noticed it except that it was standing motionless on the game trail I was following. Squirrels are seldom motionless for long—and this one wasn’t breathing.

  There was a boy, about the same age as the Salas boy, the age that Aiden appeared to be. Like the squirrel, he stood absolutely still. As Wulfe had promised, th
e boy didn’t appear to notice me, even though I walked quite close to him.

  He didn’t smell dead. Like the ogre, there was no sense of rot to him. If he hadn’t been caught in Wulfe’s spell, I wondered if I’d have realized he was a zombie at all.

  Wulfe had indicated that the well-made zombies were old. I hoped this one was old. Hoped that no one in the Tri-Cities was missing a young boy. It wasn’t particularly rational to think that the zombie would be less tragic if the child’s death had been a century ago—or yesterday. But rational people wouldn’t have been sneaking through the fields behind a house occupied by black witches, either—so there was that.

  I counted five more zombies and hoped they were set to watch the path I traveled. Hoped they weren’t evenly dispersed, because that would mean there were more zombies than even I’d estimated, based on my earlier run. Maybe too many for the old fae and his son to take care of. I drew even more comfort from the way they’d taken down the ogre zombie.

  I kept my eyes away from the fire blazing up in the backyard of Elizaveta’s house because I wanted to keep my night vision. Even so, glimpses told me that it climbed into the night sky, five or six feet high, with as much abandoned fury as if there weren’t a fire ban on for fear of lighting the dry shrub steppe that surrounded us. Just last week, a fire had burned the west slope of Badger Mountain, taking a manufactured house and two empty barns with it.

  The smoke smell had increased tremendously as soon as I’d crossed the ward at the edge of Elizaveta’s property. Smoke eventually overwhelmed my sense of smell—and that smoke had more than dry logs in it. Now that I was closer I could pick out various scents, most of which I did not recognize.

  Herbs of some sort, I thought, though I couldn’t place them beyond that. I knew what lots of herbs smelled like normally, but didn’t make a habit of burning them. Other than it wasn’t marijuana (because that was almost an incense in college), I didn’t know what kinds of herbs they had tossed in the fire.

  I also smelled burnt hair and flesh, but I tried not to think about that. The bond between Adam and me was still present. I’d hoped that if I got closer to him, it would . . . do something. Tell me something. But it just sat there—an unresponsive, greasy lump.