Storm Cursed

by Patricia Briggs

  The noises from the backyard were oddly muted. Either my hearing was going or they had some magic working to hide what they were doing from eavesdroppers. Likely a human wouldn’t have heard a thing. Maybe they wouldn’t even have seen the fire.

  The trail crossed the edge of the corner of the garden and I left it there to take the rest of the trip on my own.

  I chose to go through the garden because a coyote wouldn’t stand out among the odd lumps of vegetation the same way it would in the tidy yard. I tried not to think about what the pack had found buried in the garden—I wouldn’t have eaten anything grown here on a bet, and coyotes eat pretty much anything.

  Elizaveta’s garden was huge, filled with flowers, herbs, and vegetables. The sides were edged in grapevines that provided a thick cover for me. Not that anyone staring into that fire stood a chance of seeing a coyote in a garden at night, anyway.

  I was making my cautious way through the pumpkin vines when I felt eyes on me. I froze. When that didn’t alleviate the feeling, I turned in a slow circle. Nothing.

  I looked up.

  Just in front of me, where the garden gave way to open lawn, was a scarecrow with a dead crow on its head. The crow peered at me with bright button eyes.

  “Mercy,” it whispered to me with the voice a cornstalk might have, soft and dry with a bit of rattle.

  12

  “Mercy, what are you doing in my garden?” the bird said, then chuckled, a dry, whispery sound. “Naughty little coyote.”

  Then it raised its head—the movement engendered by a flash of gray magic—and cried in a loud voice designed to carry into the house, “Coyote, coyote, coyote is here. Coyote, coyote, coyote is here.”

  I slipped into the dense foliage of the grapevines and froze, hardly daring to breathe.

  We’d planned for this, or something like this. Without Wulfe, we knew that I could very well trip one of the protections that Elizaveta or the witches had prepared. I had a couple of things I could do if I triggered them in such a way that my comrades would be otherwise unaware of it.

  But the crow’s voice would carry well enough for the vampire to hear. Now they would try to sneak into Elizaveta’s territory the way I had just done, if they could. Zee’s glamour was, he assured us, quite up to hiding their presence unless the witches looked for magic.

  I waited for someone, anyone, to hunt for me.

  Instead, there was a pop, more of a pressure release than an actual noise. The fire got louder and I heard, for the first time, the witches’ voices quite clearly. Another ward had gone down, somewhere between me and the porch.

  “Did you hear that, Elizaveta, darlin’?” said Death in a sticky sweet voice. “You have a vermin problem in your garden?”

  At the sound of her voice, my soul grew still, grew focused. For the first time since I’d walked into Uncle Mike’s, I wasn’t afraid.

  For weeks, buried in the poor half-grown kitten’s head, I had let her hurt us, hurt others, because I was helpless to do anything else. I had had to bear mute witness to the foulness of her actions. Tonight we were going to stop her.

  The skin on my muzzle wrinkled and I had to fight back a growl.

  “What was that?” asked Magda, the zombie witch, just as the crow sounded off again. She wasn’t talking about any sound I’d made—she was talking about the crow-thing, because I hadn’t made any noise.

  I could feel the animated crow’s attention brush by me, but I was out of its area of perception now. It settled back into an inanimate object with a mutter of indignation and a ruffle of its feathers. This wasn’t a zombie; there was no semblance of life, no smell of wrongness. It was merely a simulacrum designed to warn intruders off. Elizaveta’s work—its voice had sounded like the old witch trying to mimic what a crow might sound like, assuming the crow was Russian, and it smelled like Elizaveta’s magic.

  Magda made no effort to be quiet or unobtrusive when she came to check it out. She was using her cell phone as a flashlight, but I wasn’t worried.

  A coyote’s fur is every color and blends very well into the shadows. In broad daylight the witch would have had trouble finding me where I lay under the vines. At night, as long as I kept my eyes closed so the light didn’t catch the reflection, I was virtually invisible.

  Magda marched into the garden as if she owned it. When both feet were in the worked soil, the crow came to life again.

  “Hardesty witch,” it said in a soft raspy voice. “You don’t belong here. You should go before you meet your doom.”

  “And who are you to say so?” the witch demanded.

  But the crow wasn’t really talking to her. “Witch, witch, witch,” it cried. “Elizaveta, there is a witch in our garden. Witch, witch, witch.”

  “It’s just an animation,” the zombie witch called. She turned around and tramped back out of the garden. “The crow that sits atop the scarecrow is bespelled.”

  “A scarecrow that is a crow,” said Death. Her voice was quiet. I couldn’t tell if she was speaking to Magda, who was striding back to the concrete square at the back of the house, or if she was speaking to the other people on the patio.

  “It’s that scarecrow in the garden,” Death said. “That’s quite clever; I wonder if it works on skunks.”

  “I don’t have a coyote for my collection,” Magda complained. “Why couldn’t it freeze the creature when it catches it? What’s the use in something that shrieks like that?”

  “The whole point of it is to chase the creatures out of the garden,” Death said. “I’m sorry about the coyote; it will be miles away by now. If you really want a coyote so badly, we’ll set a live trap out tomorrow. Likely the creature will be back.”

  “If she knows what’s good for her, she’ll be long gone,” said Elizaveta, making it clear that she knew who the coyote the crow had announced was. She sounded awful. Her voice was so hoarse that between the roughness and her Russian accent, I almost didn’t understand her. “Pity she didn’t come up through the lawn; she could have taken a nip out of you and not one of my little pretties would have warned you.” She coughed and spat.

  Elizaveta, I thought, relief running through my bloodstream in a wash of hope. You haven’t thrown in with the bad guys in this.

  But my relief came too soon.

  “Adam,” said Magda, “be a dear. Go find that coyote for me, kill it, and bring it back.”

  Death snorted. “Really? Don’t we have enough to do tonight that you need to make another of those things?”

  I didn’t hear Magda’s reply. I was too busy putting as much distance between me and that porch in as short a time as I could manage.

  Adam wouldn’t have a choice. I’d seen what that witch had made Elizaveta’s family do to each other, and to themselves. They were trained witches and they’d had no chance against Magda.

  I was faster than most of the werewolves, I reassured myself. I put my head down and ran for all I was worth.

  * * *

  • • •

  I didn’t make it a hundred yards before Adam’s teeth closed on the back of my neck and bit down. His momentum hit me sideways and we both tumbled to the ground and rolled. His teeth never left my neck.

  They didn’t close down, either.

  I lay limply on the ground, smelling my own blood in the night air. Adam crouched over the top of me. He growled, true anger in his voice, and I could feel the mate bond light up like a bonfire, sizzling flames burning through the muck of Magda’s compulsion with the force of Adam’s frustrated fury. Relief blossomed over me so strongly I don’t think I could have moved if I tried.

  Our connection wasn’t comfortable, but I didn’t care. His rage rolled over me first and his wolf let me know that he was not impressed with my brains or obedience. How dare I risk this, that he might be forced to kill me?

  But beneath the rage was terror, so I let him
get by with the insults. Relief hit him a few seconds later, as it had me. He let me go and lay down next to me, shivering once. Excess adrenaline, I thought. I felt the buzz, too.

  Wulfe appeared a dozen yards off and gave us both a disapproving look. “When I told you that I thought your touch might free him from her hold—given your immunity to their magic—I didn’t mean that you should touch your throat to his teeth. That generally doesn’t work as well.”

  Adam rose, head lowered, ears pinned.

  I shifted to human and touched his shoulder. “He’s on our side this time,” I told him. “I think.”

  “Thanks for that,” Wulfe said with a smirk.

  I looked at him. “Adam is free. What’s the plan now?”

  “I don’t think the plan needs to change,” he said after a moment. “Adam should go back to the witches; they’ll think he failed to catch the coyote. As long as you do what she tells you, she’ll think you are still in thrall.”

  “And if she figures it out?” I asked. “I don’t want to lose Adam to her again.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Keep your bond open the way it is now. I don’t think she can get him as long as you do.” He looked at Adam. “It looks to me like all the players are out on the patio. I heard Elizaveta. Is the senator there, too?”

  Adam nodded.

  “Go back there and look like nothing is wrong,” Wulfe said. “I plan on making an entrance and then killing the witches. Mercy was going to see if she could manage to touch you—because I was pretty sure, given how mate bonds work, that would allow her to lend you her natural talent. Then she was going to go plant herself out of sight, where she would watch for an opportunity to get the senator out of harm’s way. And looky, now there are both of you to save the senator, while yours truly bears the brunt of the battle.”

  He left out the way I was going to help kill the witches. Wulfe was not stupid. Bat-in-the-belfry bizarre, maybe. Psychopathic, certainly. But not stupid.

  Adam thought about Wulfe’s plan. Then he made a chuffing sound and gave a pointed look all around us. I could smell them, too. He paused, because there was a zombie standing twenty feet away.

  She could see us, but she didn’t do anything but watch. This one, I was afraid, was someone they had killed here. She was not well made; there was a rotting patch in the center of her right cheek through which I could see her teeth and tongue. She was about Jesse’s age.

  “Wulfe spelled them to inattentiveness for now,” I told Adam. “It won’t hold if the witch calls them. But Zee and Tad are out here, too. Their part is to take care of the zombies. They already took care of the ogre.”

  Adam tilted his head to me, and our mate bond rang with his warning.

  “Something worse than the ogre?” I said. “Do you think that Zee will be overmatched?”

  He considered that. I felt quite clearly that he wasn’t sure—but he decided to trust them.

  A piercing whistle carried over the grounds. Adam’s muzzle wrinkled and he turned his head, eyes glittering.

  “Easy there,” I said. “Do you think you can get the wolf to fake obedience?”

  The wolf was the one who answered me. How could I doubt that he, who was such a patient hunter, could wait out the witches? He could lie in wait for days if necessary.

  Adam had no ego—confidence, but no arrogance. The same was not true of his wolf.

  I smiled and kissed his nose, wolf and man with the same caress, then let the change take me to my coyote form.

  “I’ll go let the others know that we have Adam,” Wulfe said. “I’ll meet you by the garden.”

  Back to plan A with improved odds. I felt pretty good about that.

  Adam ran back to the witches and I trotted behind him, veering off when we got to the garden. I was careful not to alert the crow, tucking myself under another raspberry bush.

  I listened to the witches greet Adam on his return. They came to the conclusion we had expected from them. Then they resumed whatever they were doing that sounded like something wet hitting skin. Sometimes there were hissing sounds, and that was when I smelled burnt flesh.

  I caught the scent of something else from that direction—a zombie. The sense of wrongness from this one made me feel vaguely ill, just from the awareness that it was present. As careful as I was to examine the scent, I couldn’t put a familiar name to the kind of creature it was. It smelled almost fae, but not. Like fire magic, I thought. The hot, bitter scent of Zee’s iron-kissed magic was something akin to it, too.

  I had waited for maybe fifteen minutes before I decided I needed to see what awaited me on that porch.

  I tensed to rise to my feet, when Wulfe’s hand came down on my back. I couldn’t scent him or see him, but I knew who it was. I don’t know how I knew . . . That wasn’t quite true. I didn’t want to understand how I knew it was Wulfe.

  I see ghosts. But I know when a vampire is about, too. My kind used to hunt vampires when they first came to this country. It’s why there aren’t very many of us—the vampires were better hunters, and there were more of them.

  But I knew it was Wulfe, so I didn’t yip or do anything to draw the witches’ attention back to the garden. My clothes dropped in a pile on the ground next to me, along with my gun and my cutlass.

  “Don’t try using the gun on the witches,” Wulfe breathed into my ear. “It won’t work.”

  His voice in my ear was weird because I couldn’t sense him with my normal senses, just with that odd gift I used to find the dead. I didn’t like having that connection to him. I didn’t want any connection to Wulfe.

  I got to my feet and slunk along the ground toward the huge patio where there would have been room for the whole pack to congregate. There was plenty of room for a few witches, a senator, a werewolf, and a . . . I stopped moving because I simply couldn’t make myself look away.

  Curled up next to Adam, and nearly double his bulk, was . . . a something. It was covered in iridescent white scales about six inches across. I couldn’t see its head, only a single silver-and-purple-laced wing—the other presumably on the other side of the dragon.

  I put my head back down, and with even more care than before, I moved from one spot of darkness to the next—but it didn’t matter. Everyone on that patio was focused on something that wasn’t a coyote ghosting in the dark—or a freaking dragon zombie. I could feel their focus with the same hunter’s instinct that had kicked in when Elizaveta’s crow had detected me. While I was moving, all I cared about—aside from the dragon—was that no one was looking for me.

  I didn’t look directly at the occupants of the patio until I’d come around to where the firepit wasn’t between me and them. Then I took it all in with a single encompassing look, before I let my gaze fall to the side.

  I wasn’t the only hunter present. I didn’t know how good witches are at feeling eyes on them from the darkness. But the dragon was there. I had trusted Wulfe’s zombie-sleep spell absolutely until the dragon. But everything I’d ever heard about dragons (aside from the fact that there were no such things) told me that magic wouldn’t work on them. But since someone had turned one into a zombie, I was pretty sure that some magic had to work on them. What I didn’t know was how well Wulfe’s magic would work on the one on the patio.

  I heard a slithery noise and glanced back over at the patio. The dragon had rolled over and was looking straight at me.

  As I looked into its purple eyes, I felt its connection to the witch and through her to all the dead she commanded. Their connection was like spider silk in comparison to the stout chains of our pack’s bonds . . . but it was less unlike than I was comfortable with. Later that might bother me.

  Right then I was more concerned by how many of them there were. For a moment, caught in our shared gaze, I felt them all—a great weight of misery that stretched across Elizaveta’s property. There weren’t ten or twenty of them.
There were dozens. Hundreds. Some made with great care, others newly made and rotting already.

  But they were not my task.

  I closed my eyes, breaking our tie. When I opened my eyes again, I watched the dragon, but I did not look at its eyes. I moved cautiously and its gaze did not follow me. I couldn’t tell if it was still caught up in Wulfe’s spell, or if it was just indifferent to me.

  There were other participants that I needed to take note of. Senator Campbell was gagged and tied to a chair, Abbot on the ground beside him. I had forgotten about Tory Abbot, the senator’s aide. I watched him, but he had his head down and wasn’t moving.

  The senator was hurt. I couldn’t see anything specific because the flickering firelight hid the tones of his skin and most of him was covered by his clothes. But I could see pain in the hunch of his body.

  He saw me. But he didn’t know what I was, and he probably assumed that I was another of the zombie witch’s creations, her abominations. Maybe, if he’d been paying attention to the witches’ conversation, he thought I was just a coyote. A short, sharp scream made him turn his attention away from me, toward the star of tonight’s show.

  Elizaveta. They had stripped her naked and hung her upside down from the basketball hoop pole next to the house. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but the skin on her face was bruised darkly enough that I could see it, even in the poor lighting. Her white hair hung down in an untidy mess. Her arms hung limply, a few inches off the ground, bound together with heavy manacles that looked as though they belonged in a medieval dungeon.

  Magda had her hands in front of her mouth, like a child in a candy store who was trying to decide which flavor was best when all of them were wonderful. She swayed a little and hummed. I’d had my eyes shut when she’d joined me in the garden, so this was the first time tonight that I took in her appearance.