Storm Cursed

by Patricia Briggs

  She reached for her purse, but Uncle Mike prevented her from touching it. Sherwood reached in and took out her phone, which was lying on top.

  “It’s not locked,” he said.

  He tipped it so Uncle Mike and I could see, and went through the photo gallery. Pictures of ten dead bodies, most of whom I didn’t know. Spielman was there. The skin around his eye was still bruised. I’d liked Spielman. There were a couple of others who might have been in the meeting I’d attended. None of them were my pack.

  Even though the pack bonds were live, I’d half expected to see one of the pack among the dead. The witches terrified me—partially because I really had no good understanding of the limits of their power.

  “I suppose they might still be alive,” Sherwood said. “If you can think of a reason they’d be acting dead.”

  “I am . . . I was to drive to your house. The address was programmed into my car,” Ruth said, in a completely different voice—her own voice. Then she gasped as if she were having trouble breathing. “I came here instead. Thought the fae could help.”

  I glanced at Uncle Mike.

  He said, “Some of the great ones, maybe, but witchcraft is . . . more like Underhill’s magic. It doesn’t answer well to the fae.”

  “Sherwood?” I asked.

  Sweat gathered on Ruth’s forehead and she gripped Uncle Mike’s hands. “Don’t let me go,” she gasped in a whisper. “Was supposed to attack. There’s a knife . . . a knife.”

  “We took it when you came here,” he crooned. “There’s no knife now.”

  I turned to Sherwood, who stood as far from her as he could get, his eyes wild—but not wolfish. It had been the wolf who’d taken down that zombie, I thought. The man didn’t want to remember.

  I wished Elizaveta were here. Sort of. Wulfe?

  If they wanted Elizaveta for their coven, they’d be salivating for Wulfe. I didn’t know what witchblood family line he carried—or if he was wizard instead. But he was twisted like a pretzel and he represented a lot of power. On the whole, it was probably good that he wasn’t here.

  “Sherwood,” I said. My voice was quiet, but there was authority in it. Not Adam’s, I realized, because the bond between my mate and me felt like it was filled with cold grease—sluggish and reluctant—when I tried to draw on it.

  Panicked, I reached for Adam again . . . and our bond was back to being uncommunicative, but healthy. Maybe it had just been that I was smack-dab in the middle of a fog of foul magic.

  In any case, I couldn’t afford to fret about Adam right now. I put that concern aside. Right now we were dealing with a good woman hexed by witches.

  “Mercy, her breathing keeps stopping,” Uncle Mike said. “I’ve already done what we can. We tried the usual salt and circles as soon as we realized she’d been cursed. Had no effect at all. Usually salt and circles work on everything.”

  “They have her blood,” Sherwood said, still with his back against the door. His eyes were trying to go wolf, but he was fighting it. “Blood magic is harder to block.”

  I didn’t need Sherwood Post. I needed—

  “Wolf,” I said, yanking on the pack bond between him and me.

  Sherwood jerked as if that pull had been physical. Then he turned his head toward me and snarled—and this time his eyes were wolf.

  “Sherwood,” I said clearly. “Fix her.” I pointed at Ruth without looking away from his eyes. “Fix her and then we’ll go out and hunt some witches.”

  I didn’t know why I said that last. Sherwood certainly had never shown any desire to go out and hunt witches, not even after he’d destroyed the zombie werewolf that had been made from the body of someone he’d obviously known.

  He looked at me with golden eyes and growled, “Done.”

  I was afraid I’d gone too far and he’d begin the change. But I’m not that dominant unless I can pull authority from Adam, and our bond was being stubbornly quiescent.

  Sherwood looked at Uncle Mike and rumbled, “I need chalk or a pencil. A candle and a knife.”

  Uncle Mike went to his desk and opened a drawer from which he gathered a piece of chalk, a pencil, a candle just barely small enough to have fit in a drawer, and a silver knife. He glanced at the knife and put it back.

  He handed over everything else to Sherwood, who had left the door to kneel beside Ruth, prosthetic leg stretched out awkwardly. For her part, Ruth was slowly writhing, both hands against her throat, tears sliding out of her eyes.

  “Why didn’t you give him the knife?” I asked.

  “That was the athame the witch gave Ruth to kill you with,” Uncle Mike told me. “I don’t know how it ended up in my drawer, because that’s not where I put it. Under the circumstances, I think that it’s probably best not to use it for this.”

  “I have my cutlass—” I began.

  Uncle Mike shook his head. “I have something better than a cutlass, no matter how fine.” He pulled a worn pocketknife out of a pouch on his belt and gave it to Sherwood, who took it with a raised eyebrow.

  “My word that for this purpose, it’s just a pocketknife. Be careful, wolf, it is sharp.”

  That seemed to be enough for Sherwood. He took the chalk and began to draw symbols on Uncle Mike’s cement floor.

  The leg got in his way again and with a growl he pressed something on the ankle of the prosthetic and pulled it off with so little trouble that I wondered if he’d broken something and would have trouble putting it back on. Especially since he tossed it across the room with frustrated speed. It hit one of the metal file cabinets and left a dent.

  His knee seemed to be his own . . . which shouldn’t have surprised me. In werewolf form he was missing most of his leg, but a human knee corresponded to the stifle joint, which is farther up the wolf’s leg.

  The leg dealt with, Sherwood continued to draw. I would have had trouble writing at the speed he moved—and he was drawing things a lot more complicated than a letter from the Latin alphabet. I’ve never seen a werewolf use their enhanced speed to draw before.

  Ruth’s breathing was oddly broken. She wouldn’t breathe for a minute or two, and then she’d gasp and wheeze for a little bit until she stopped breathing again. While she gasped and wheezed she would flop around like a fish out of water. Her hand hit one of the chalk symbols Sherwood had drawn, scuffing it.

  Sherwood caught her arm before she could do it again. He looked at me. “Can you tie her up? I’m drawing a circle.”

  “No need for bonds, I don’t think,” said Uncle Mike. The old fae touched Ruth on the shoulder. She quit moving.

  “Will that harm your working?” he asked Sherwood. “I put a hold on her arms and legs and back muscles. Bound her a bit to the floor in case. We don’t want her moving into your work, but I want her to be able to breathe if she can.”

  Sherwood looked at Ruth as if he could see something that I couldn’t.

  “No,” said the wolf in Sherwood’s human body. “That will be all right. Good.”

  He didn’t say thank you. He was wise enough to know better than to thank a fae, no matter how helpful Uncle Mike had been.

  He fixed the symbol Ruth had marred, then went back to work. When his piece of chalk got too small, Sherwood took the pencil—grunting in approval when he saw it was a grease pencil. But he said, “This won’t last long and I don’t have time to unwrap the damned thing.”

  “Pencil or chalk?” asked Uncle Mike.

  “Pencil if you have a dozen so I don’t have to mess with them.”

  Uncle Mike went back to the drawer and pulled out a handful of pencils—and the silver knife. He frowned at the athame, this time keeping it in his hand. When he got close enough to hand Sherwood the pencils, Ruth’s eyes opened, focused on the silver knife.

  “Get that away from us,” growled Sherwood. “I’ll take care of it later.”

 
Every time Ruth quit breathing, I counted the seconds off in my head. I wasn’t sure why; I didn’t really know how long a person could go without air. But it seemed to me that she had been not breathing a lot longer than earlier episodes.

  Sherwood must have been paying attention, too. He quit drawing long enough to put a hand on her forehead.

  “Breathe,” he said.

  She sucked in a breath of air and released it.

  “Again,” he said.

  When she had accomplished that, he went back to drawing.

  “Can’t do that too often,” he muttered—to me, I supposed—but it might have been to himself. “Or I’ll disrupt what I’m trying to do here. Still, I suppose this won’t do any good if she dies in the meantime.”

  Ten pencils were discarded the same way his discarded leg had been—as was the chair when it got in his way. The file cabinet acquired another dent—this one bigger than the first. Uncle Mike muttered something that sounded like “Werewolves,” but he didn’t sound too unhappy about the chair even though it was obviously broken.

  Sherwood completed the circle before he had to switch pencils again. Then he lit the candle.

  He did it by saying a word; I didn’t quite catch it, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t English. But at the sound of it, there was a pop of magic and the candle wick started to burn.

  He held the candle sideways and let the wax drip into a place where the grease made a circle about the size of the base of the candle. When he had enough soft wax on the floor, he set the candle into it, using the wax to create a holder to keep the candle upright.

  He took up Uncle Mike’s knife and opened it. He frowned at it and cast a wary look at Uncle Mike—who’d moved to the far end of the room, with the silver athame in one hand.

  “It’s just a knife today,” Uncle Mike said. “It will do as you wish.” He wiggled the athame in his hand. “This one is not as cooperative. You might want to deal with it quickly, when you’re done. It seems to have a taste for one of you—probably Mercy.”

  “Ruth,” said Sherwood, staring at the knife for an instant. “It’s supposed to kill Ruth.” Again, I had the impression that he could see something I could not. As if the patterns of magic were something his eyes could perceive. It seemed to be more accurate than my scent-and-hair-on-the-back-of-my-neck method.

  Sherwood used Uncle Mike’s pocketknife to open up a cut on the back of his hand, keeping it open by moving the blade back and forth as he dripped his blood along the edge of the circle all the way around. It was made more difficult because he couldn’t use either of his hands to stabilize himself—and the missing leg seemed to put him off-balance.

  “This would be easier,” he grunted, crawling awkwardly, “if I’d pulled off the liner and the pin with the damned leg.”

  I got up and put a hand under his elbow to help stabilize him. “Does this help?”

  “Yes,” he said—then turned his attention to what he was doing.

  When he reached the candle again with his blood-drip circle, he dug a little deeper with the knife, pulled it away, and flicked his bleeding hand at Ruth. As the drops of his blood touched her, he said three . . . somethings. They sounded like musical notes more than words, but they were more complex than a single note, as if he could form a chord with his human throat.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  That was not quite true. Nothing happened except that the moment he flicked those blood drops on Ruth, the foulness of black magic, or my sense of it, just disappeared. There was plenty of magic, for sure, but only a little of it felt like black magic.

  I was eyeing the knife in Uncle Mike’s hand, and so I missed the first bit. The little movement that made Uncle Mike stiffen and Sherwood actually relax a little under my hand.

  By the time I looked at the circle, Ruth’s mouth was already open. The first scream had almost no sound—because she had no air to make a noise. The second scream was even quieter, her whole body shaking with the effort of it. If she could have moved her body with Uncle Mike’s magic upon her, I think she would have done so, but all she could do was move her mouth and her rib cage.

  My eyes teared up and I dug my fingers into Sherwood’s shoulder—because there was nothing, not a darn thing I could do to help her except break the circle (maybe I could do that) and waste all of Sherwood’s efforts.

  The third scream was silent. Blood gathered in the corners of Ruth’s beautiful dark eyes and dribbled out of her mouth, staining her white teeth red.

  Sherwood remained as he was, crouched near the circle—ready to intervene if matters didn’t go as he thought they should. I let go of him so he could move more quickly if he had to, but he just waited.

  “And that’s why I hate witchcrafters,” said Uncle Mike, his voice a prosaic contrast to the events in the circle. “So much blood in their workings.” He sounded vaguely disapproving.

  Sherwood raised his head. “And the fae are so gentle.”

  “No,” Uncle Mike agreed. “Mostly we’re worse—but not as messy.”

  As if the circle held the very air inside it as well as the magic, I could not smell the blood—or other things—as matters took their course. Ruth Gillman, elegant and tidy, would not be happy remembering this moment, but hopefully she would be alive.

  Ruth’s mouth opened wider and blood, bright arterial blood, gushed out, flooding the circle where she lay, unable to move her body. The blood hit the edge of Sherwood’s drawings and stopped, as if the chalk and pencil were a raised ledge that it could not cross. Where it touched Sherwood’s work, it turned grayish black. Not a color I’d ever seen blood display.

  As the liquid began to increase impossibly, I said, quietly, so as not to interrupt things that I might not be able to perceive, “She’s going to drown in that if she can’t get her head up. She’s also going to exsanguinate if she keeps going.”

  “Patience.” Sherwood gave me a quick glance I could not read. I thought maybe he was just making sure I wasn’t going to try to rescue her. “And that blood is . . . not all her blood. Well, no, it’s her blood but it’s reproducing. Cloning, you could say. Though I wouldn’t.”

  “And that makes sense,” said Uncle Mike dryly.

  “How would you have put it?” asked Sherwood. Sherwood’s wolf, I thought, and he put a bit of a growl in his voice.

  Uncle Mike smiled slyly. “Magic blood.”

  Sherwood snorted. “Makes it sound as if it weren’t blood at all—or as if you could do something powerful with it.” He paused. “But, since it is blood, her blood even, I suppose that’s true enough.”

  They might have been . . . not precisely joking . . . sparring was more like it. But they were both watching Ruth intently.

  “She’s breathing,” I said.

  Ruth was still vomiting blood (and everything else she had eaten or drunk recently), but she was inhaling and exhaling in between spasms.

  Sherwood nodded. “This is a nasty bit of work. There’s probably a more humane way of breaking this spell, but I don’t know it. Maybe if I were in my own space with my own . . .” He shook his head and didn’t complete that thought.

  He leaned forward, careful not to get too near to the circle. “Poor darling,” he said. “Sorry, sorry. It’s rough, I know. But you’re going to be all right in a moment. I promise that the worst is over.”

  It was ten or fifteen minutes before the blood and horror subsided. Sherwood, still watching something I couldn’t, said, “There now, that’s done it.”

  He snapped his fingers, the candle went out, and the room suddenly bloomed with the smell of everything in the circle, blood and vomit and other things—the sour smell of terror and dissipating black magic underlying everything. Fluids that had been held back by Sherwood’s marks slid out over them. But the mess looked to have been reduced to only the nonmagical substances, so it didn’t flow
very far.

  Uncle Mike started over and Sherwood snapped, “Knife. That knife needs to stay away from Ruth.”

  Uncle Mike gave the knife an . . . intrigued look.

  “Hah,” he said. “I’d forgotten I had it. What an interesting knife for them to let come into enemy hands.”

  I glanced at Sherwood. “Is it safe for me to touch her?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But she’ll not thank you for it. Everything will hurt just now—like being parboiled alive, as I recall. Give her a few minutes.”

  I’d been reaching for her, but at Sherwood’s words, I backed off.

  “Ruth needs a shower and clean clothes,” I told Uncle Mike. “Is that available here?”

  “Of course,” he said. “But perhaps Sherwood should deal with the knife first. I need to touch her so she can move again. But I can’t get near her with this knife. I don’t like the feeling that I should just set this knife down and forget about it.”

  “Mercy,” Sherwood said, “could you get my leg for me, please?”

  Happy to have something I could do to help, I fetched the prosthesis for him. He hiked up the leg of his jeans and I saw that he had a spike sticking out of the bottom of the stump of his leg.

  He saw my look and smiled with his wolf’s eyes.

  I was raised by werewolves and I’m mated to one. I’d never seen one smile quite like that. Werewolves just don’t do merry, not their wolf part. And the emotion seemed a little out of place with Ruth recovering painfully in a puddle of blood and other substances. But wolves don’t always react the way a human might to dire situations.

  “The pin isn’t coming out of my leg,” he told me. “There’s a silicone sleeve around the stump that holds the pin.”

  He took the leg and fitted it on, and got up using only his good leg in a smooth movement that proved he was not human. Someone who was all human would have had a lot more trouble doing that gracefully. Then he put the artificial foot on the ground and stomped with it until there was a sharp click.