Campbell laughed. “I didn’t expect to like you.”
“Funny what happens when you talk to people,” I said.
Campbell nodded. “Fair enough.” He spread his hands out, palms up. I think they teach politicians to use their hands when they talk in politician school. “So talk, Ms. Hauptman. Tell me about the witches who spooked you.”
They also teach them to lie. Campbell had expected to like Adam and he wouldn’t push a button to eliminate all the werewolves and fae in the world—though he’d been honest enough about keeping the werewolves away from the general population.
“There are at least two witches who entered our territory a few weeks ago. We became aware of them last week. From their actions and what one of them told me directly, they intend to stop the talks between the fae and the government,” I said.
“I’ve been reading the Herald,” he said. The Tri-City Herald is our local newspaper. “Are the witches responsible for the zombies?”
“The zombie cow made Facebook sit up and beg,” said Ruth. “That cowboy is fine.”
“His boyfriend thinks so, too,” I said.
“Honey, I am married,” she told me. “And my wife was the one who pointed out what a hunk your zombie-roping man is. There is something about a man with a lasso.”
I grinned at her. “I’ll tell him you said so.”
“When you are through flirting with the enemy, Ruth, we could get back on topic.” There was irony in the senator’s tone, but no bite.
I told him about the witches, beginning with the difference between a white witch, a gray witch, and a black witch. None of that, I saw, was news to either Ruth or the senator. I began with the zombie miniature goats all the way through the poppet at my garage yesterday. I brushed over Elizaveta’s fourteen dead with “a forceful attack on our local witches.” After a moment’s thought, I included what my nose had told me about Abbot.
“Oh no, honey,” Ruth said. “Tory Abbot is a good man. He goes to church every Sunday.”
“Abbot,” said Campbell slowly. “Abbot changed a few months ago.”
“He got married,” said Ruth. “That kind of thing changes a man a little.” But there was no conviction in her voice. Something about that change had bothered her, too.
“To a nice girl from Tennessee?” I was guessing, but . . . Abbot had smelled like the zombie witch.
“How’d you know?” asked Ruth.
“The Hardesty witches come from Tennessee,” Adam told them. “From what we can find out, the family is large. They own businesses all over the country. But the core of their power is in Tennessee.”
“You told me there was something off about Tory’s new wife,” Campbell said to Ruth. “You didn’t like the way she treated him.”
“Ordered him around like a dog,” said Ruth. “You think she is a witch?” She paused, thinking about it. “I could see that. There is a core of cold in her that chills my bones.”
“So what should we do?” Campbell asked.
“Don’t be alone in a room with Abbot’s wife,” I told him. “Don’t let her into your personal spaces.”
“Most witches are going to avoid you like the plague,” Adam told him. “They are trying to survive by hiding in plain sight. They don’t want to draw notice. I don’t know what’s up with this bunch, but they are not acting like normal witches.
“In the meantime,” Adam said, “I can send over some of my pack to keep an eye out.”
“No,” said Campbell heavily. “Let me think about this. I have some experts I can consult.”
“Okay.” Adam stood up, so I followed suit.
Ruth took out a card and gave it to me. “The senator gave me your number. Why don’t we do lunch tomorrow—just you and I. And we can discuss how best we should deal with the Gray Lords. I would be grateful for anything you could tell me.”
Campbell’s hawk eyes met mine. “You aren’t the only person we are talking to about this, but we’ll take anything you can add.”
The senator had gotten to his feet when Ruth and I had, but he let Ruth lead us from the room. I got to the door and turned back to him.
“Senator, I didn’t know you were Native American?”
His eyebrows climbed to his hairline. “That’s because I’m not. What gave you that impression?”
I shook my head. “Sorry. Something about your eyes.”
He shook his head. “Wish I were,” he said. “It would help me get the Native American vote in Minnesota. Being red in a blue state, I need every vote I can get.”
* * *
• • •
Adam waited until we were in the SUV before asking me, “What was that about?”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I murmured. “If the senator isn’t one of Hawk’s children, I’ll eat my hat.”
“You don’t have a hat,” Adam said.
“I feel like all I need is the right perspective and everything will become clear,” I told him. “I’m calling Stefan tonight. I meant to do it last night. But I’m a lot more interested in what he managed to dig up on Frost now than before.”
“You think Frost ties into all of this?” Adam asked.
I huffed. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I think,” Adam said, “that I am heartily tired of witches.”
“Hear, hear,” I said. “So would you vote for him for president?”
“Yes,” Adam said without hesitation.
“Huh,” I said. “I’d vote for Ruth. She didn’t lie.”
“Politicians have to lie,” Adam said. “It’s written into their black souls. It’s only a problem when they begin to believe their own lies.”
“And these are the people we are going to introduce to the fae,” I said.
Adam smiled. “I’m kind of looking forward to it.”
“You probably would have liked bloody gladiator sports, too,” I said, leaning my head on his shoulder.
* * *
• • •
When I called his cell that night, Stefan didn’t answer his phone. When I called his home phone, I didn’t recognize the boy who answered it, but he called for Rachel, whom I did know.
“Hey, Mercy,” she said. “I don’t know where Stefan is. He left last night to go talk to Marsilia and hasn’t made it back yet.”
“Is that usual?” I asked.
“It’s not unusual,” she told me, “but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it happens all the time.” She paused. “She wants him back and he lets her think that might happen. He thinks that you are safer as long as she thinks she can bring him back into the fold.”
“Is that dangerous for him?” I asked slowly.
She laughed bitterly. “She’s a vampire, Mercy. Of course it’s dangerous.” Her voice softened. “But he’s not dumb—and he’s not an easy mark. He’s been playing games with her and worse for centuries and he’s not dead yet.”
I didn’t correct her—Stefan had been dead for a very long time. But Rachel had not had an easy life and I liked her. I tried not to pick at her unless I had to.
* * *
• • •
Adam went right to sleep. I had more trouble. I felt like we were all standing around waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Senator Campbell was a walker like me—or rather, like my friend Hank. Though he didn’t know it. Should I have told him?
That did answer the question of whether I’d know a walker when I met them—so the Salas family’s resistance to witchcraft must have been because they were witchborn. I felt a little uneasy that Elizaveta knew it now, too. When Arnoldo called, assuming he would, I would see if I could talk him into moving elsewhere.
Was it important that Campbell was a walker? Was it important to the witches? Did they know?
“Adam,” I said.
�
��I’m asleep, Mercy. It’s a guy thing. We like to sleep after sex.”
“Frost wanted to take over the North American vampires, and he mostly managed it,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed, rolling over so he could look at me. “For this you wake me up?”
“He intended to bring them out to the public,” I said. “So they could hunt like vampires of old.”
“That’s what he said,” Adam agreed.
“But that would be stupid,” I said. “If the vampires come out—especially if they are engaging in hunting in ways that terrorize the human population—they’ll be hunted into extinction.”
“Yes.” Adam’s voice was patient. “He’s not the first idiot to attain power.”
“He corrupted and then funded the Cantrip agents who kidnapped the pack and tried to force you to kill Senator Campbell.”
“Yes,” said Adam slowly—and I knew he saw it, too.
“You thought that they didn’t care if you were successful or not, thought they had a backup plan to kill him. All they wanted was to pin the attempt on werewolves.”
“Yes.” Adam sat up. Then he got out of bed and started to pace as he ran through the patterns that I was painting. He had a better understanding of politics than I did because he actually trod the halls of power occasionally.
He stopped to look out the window. He was naked and I got a little distracted.
“Sorry,” I said, “I was distracted by the scenery. What did you say?”
He grinned at me, showing a flash of dimple. “I said, what if we assume that Frost wasn’t stupid?”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Let’s say that he was a witchborn vampire,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed.
“It’s like your miniature zombie goats,” he said. “The important thing isn’t the ‘miniature’ or the ‘goat,’ it’s the ‘zombie.’ With Frost, the important thing isn’t the ‘vampire.’ It’s the ‘witchborn.’ If we look at it like that, then he was engineering the downfall of werewolves and vampires.”
I nodded. “And then he wasn’t being stupid. So what does that have to do with what the witches are trying now?”
“Damned if I know,” he said, after a long moment.
I pulled the covers up under my chin. “Me, either. But it clears up a few things.”
“So that was what was keeping you up?” Adam asked.
I nodded.
“You can sleep now?”
“And so can you,” I promised.
Adam shook his head slowly and lowered his brows, his eyes flashing gold for a moment. “Nudge,” he said.
* * *
• • •
I fell right asleep afterward, feeling warm and comfortable and safe.
That didn’t last long.
I dreamed that I was walking along a road. It seemed familiar, somehow. I couldn’t quite place it until I realized that there was someone walking with me.
“You could have picked anywhere,” I told Coyote. “Why did you choose a dirt road in the middle of Finley?”
Coyote stopped walking and I turned to face him.
“Because,” he said soberly, “it is better to come home.”
I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“I have,” he said, “some information for you.”
“What is that?” I asked.
Coyote didn’t answer me in words.
* * *
• • •
I was locked in a cage with my brother, and I hurt. I was scared and he was scared and we huddled together in joined misery. We lived in moment-to-moment terror, waiting in dread for when we were taken out of the cages again. When the new witches came, when the old ones screamed out their lives, I was glad because I thought they’d forget about us.
I was wrong.
It took me a while to come to myself enough to realize what had happened. Coyote had put me into the mind of Sherwood’s cat sometime before the Hardesty witches killed Elizaveta’s people. I was dreaming, I remembered, so all I had to do was wake up.
But I couldn’t wake up.
Time did not speed up like it did in normal dreams. Minutes crept by like minutes. Hours were hours. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to move—but my catself cleaned my brother’s face so he’d know he wasn’t alone. It comforted us. All three of us.
The cat became aware of me at some point. He didn’t seem frightened by having a visitor inside his head, though I couldn’t communicate with him very well. I crooned to him while the witches did their work, harvesting our misery. I don’t know if he heard me or not.
“Amputation and mutilation are not effective,” the witch the others called Death told the young woman who had taken our eye with disapproval. “The shock can kill the animal, and that is a waste of potential magic to be harvested. They aren’t human, and they don’t realize that you have done permanent damage, so there is no additional boost from emotional trauma.”
The cat and I disagreed with her. But we didn’t tell her so.
The other witch, who was Elizaveta’s kin, who had spent the last few days learning from Death, prodded our new wound and then coated it with a paste that made us cry piteously.
In my human life I had found that witch dead (will have found her dead) in the workroom of Elizaveta’s house. Militza. I was not sorry that she would die.
The cat’s senses were different from my coyote’s, from my human ones. He could see the ghosts better than I could, and he saw the witches as entirely different from the humans. The witches mostly appeared oddly twisted—not visually, but to some other sense I could find no human correlation for. I knew, because the cat knew.
Death, on the other hand, was a black hole so dense that we shivered from the icy cold of it. She was scary on a level that if we could have willed ourselves to die before she ever touched us again, we would have.
The zombie witch was there, too. She had a touch of that fathomless void that watched us as we watched it. We grew to know her, as we did Elizaveta’s witches. But because I knew that they all died, the cat and I ignored Elizaveta’s family and watched the Hardesty witches. We learned who they were and what they wanted, and it terrified us.
After a number of days had passed, I forgot that I was not the cat.
When Death stopped the world, I huddled with my brother and felt the life leave his body. I waited for her to take me, too. I felt her magic sweep over me, but it could not take hold. I hid against my dead brother and tried not to attract her notice.
* * *
• • •
My face was pressed against gravel, my paws . . . fingers dug into the ground as I curled tighter into myself and sobbed for my dead brother, making hoarse, ugly sounds. I cried for the creatures who died to feed Death’s appetite, and I cried for the darkness in the world.
A man’s voice crooned to me, saying words that didn’t make sense. I knew that voice, but it did not bring me any comfort.
But a warm blanket was laid over me, and the night sky gave way with bewildering swiftness to golden sun that warmed the blanket and made me feel safer. I breathed in the familiar scents of sage, sun, and fresh air.
“Come home, little coyote,” said Coyote. His voice was as gentle as I’d ever heard it, and he petted the top of my head. “You are safe. For now, anyway.”
After a while I quit crying, though I remained curled in a ball in the middle of the road. His touch was an anchor that kept me from drifting back into the witch’s lair.
“Those times are all in the past and beyond changing,” he said, and then his hand stilled. “Huh. I had wondered how that single half-grown cat escaped Death. I found it was convenient because if I’d used one of the animals who died it might have killed you, too. He didn’t appear to be special—and now I find that I saved him myself and didn’t know it. Ho
w clever of me.”
I braced myself on my arms and sat up. My whole body ached down to the bone. His hand fell away from my head, but that was okay, I didn’t need it anymore.
He smiled brightly at me, rising to a crouch but keeping his face at my level. “I guess you could claim credit, too. If you hadn’t been with him when Death called—resistant as you are to the magic of the dead—he would have died, too.”
I cleared my throat and tried to speak but my mouth was too dry. I swallowed a couple of times and tried again. “You suck.”
He beamed and rubbed his chest with false modesty. “I do try.” Then all the laughter left him.
“The Hardesty witches are abominations. They take death, a change that is sacred, and they profane it. Kill them, my child. Kill them and kill their kin.”
I looked at him, inclined, after my sojourn, to agree with him. Instead I held up one finger. “You aren’t the boss of me.” I held up a second finger. “I am not an assassin.” I held up a third finger. “Who are you to complain about making the sacred profane? Isn’t that what you do?” I held up a fourth finger. “I am, in this moment, more inclined to kill you than anyone else.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Good. Good. Take that anger and remember, all I did was allow you to see what they are.”
“What do you care about them for?” I said. “Did one of the witches place a curse on you?”
He hung his head and looked up at me through his lashes. His eyes were mournful and sly. “Yes,” he said, then shook his head. “No.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He sat on the ground beside me and crossed his legs. “Oh, it’s story time,” he said. Then he sat without talking for a long time.
“Yes?” I said.
“You aren’t ready to hear this story,” he said. “So I’m trying to make up another one. But it isn’t working. So let me just say this.” He looked at me, and his face and body were suddenly very serious. “Death is sacred. It is a change . . . and I am the spirit of change. So death is sacred, specifically to me. The Hardesty witches are blood-tied, by bone, by breeding, and by choice, to death magics.” He paused to give greater weight to his words, then said, “Zombies are anathema.”
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