Storm Cursed

by Patricia Briggs

  The dragon zombie turned its attack to the ground, digging in the dirt at the base of the concrete. Concrete—the kind poured for patios—would not have slowed down a werewolf, and it didn’t slow down the dragon, either. For a zombie, this one was smart.

  This is wrong, said Coyote’s voice in my head, and he didn’t mean the way the dragon was burrowing into our zombie-free zone.

  There were no words for how beautiful the dragon was—even if it was smaller than I’d expected a dragon to be. The bones of its face were covered by minute scales, each glittering like a gem in the light of the fire. A thousand points of light that blossomed into an iridescent blanket. Delicate, impossibly fragile-looking membranous wings were held out to balance the dragon as it dug. Great purple eyes were fixed on its goal.

  I could only imagine what it would have looked like if it had been alive.

  This zombie was an abomination.

  Wrong.

  I raised my hand toward her. Maybe it was by chance, or maybe she had felt me watching her, but she raised her eyes to mine. Hers, not its. There was something looking at me from inside those eyes. Tears gathered in my own eyes at the terrible evil of what had been done to her.

  Wood scraped near me and I looked over at the table the dragon had smashed. Abbot crawled out of the shelter he’d found in the broken boards. He was wearing clothing that had once been suitable for meeting the president, but I didn’t think there was a dry cleaner in the world who could repair it now. There was blood smeared around his mouth and down the front of his shirt and pants.

  “Vampire,” he said.

  And he gathered power, a black mass of crafting. Witch, I thought, not zombie. He strode forward as if he hadn’t just been hiding under a pile of wood, as if he hadn’t gnawed into the senator’s leg when Campbell was tied and couldn’t defend himself. He walked like a warrior wading into a familiar battlefield.

  “Wulfe!” I screamed.

  Wulfe was too busy with the witches to pay attention. I didn’t know what to do. Wulfe had made it quite clear that once he’d engaged in battle, I was to stay away.

  Abbot pulled a knife from a pocket, flicked it open, and cut himself. Then in a gesture that reminded me of Sherwood’s motion earlier tonight, he flung his own blood at Wulfe’s back. I was too far away and it was too dark—the firelight was tricky, full of strong light and shadows—to see if it hit Wulfe.

  But it must have. Because when Abbot took all the power he’d gathered and shoved it into his voice, saying, “Vampire,” Wulfe froze.

  The two witches stopped their dance midmove. I don’t know what Magda’s face looked like, because I was watching the smile bloom on Patience’s face. Death’s face. Because patience is a virtue and there was nothing good about the expression on her face.

  “Oh, vampire,” Magda said. “We haven’t had a vampire like you to play with in a long time. Ours used to be fun, but now she only curls up in a corner and cries.”

  And just at that moment, the dragon’s claws broke through the concrete and my attention was forced to a more immediate problem. The zombie ripped a two-foot-square chunk away from the patio and hauled it down.

  For a moment I could see a hole, and then it was filled with dragon. She’d misjudged; there wasn’t enough room for her to squeeze through. But she’d already proven that Elizaveta’s circle only went down to the ground, and that the ground and concrete were no match for her. It would only take a moment for her to widen the hole.

  I don’t know why I didn’t run screaming. But Coyote’s voice still rang in my head. Also, after all the sadness I felt in seeing this thing that had once been a dragon, there was no room inside me for anything else—not even healthy emotions like terror or self-preservation.

  Touch is important in magic.

  I reached down and put my hand on her forehead. She couldn’t quite get her shoulders and forelimbs through, but all she would have had to do was twist her head and she could have taken off my arm at the elbow.

  A bond lit up between us, bright and clean, a connection both like and unlike the kinds of bonds I was more familiar with. This wasn’t pack magic. This was a thing of Coyote, who was the spirit of free agency. Of choice, for good and ill. Of death and dying.

  “Go,” I told the dragon. I put power into my voice, power that I’d learned from Adam, but I didn’t need to borrow from my mate for this. This power came from my father. I whispered, because this was not a power that needed volume. “Go. Be at peace.”

  “No!” It was Magda’s voice, I think. “Stop her!” The dragon went limp beneath my fingers. Her body shrank as if the flesh were nothing without the terrible magic that kept it animate. She no longer filled the hole completely; soon other zombies would break through the opening she had made.

  It didn’t take long. Something ripped the dragon’s desiccating body away and a woman began to slither through. She was smaller than the dragon—there was plenty of room for her.

  But I was still caught in that odd headspace where I wasn’t afraid of the zombies—I was sad for them. I reached out, but this time I didn’t try to touch her skin. This time I reached out for the threads of power that bound this zombie to the witch whose creature she was.

  Instead of grasping only her threads, my fingers closed on dozens of strings. They weren’t comfortable to hold, those bonds, too full of that terrible wrongness.

  My grip didn’t feel firm enough, so I twisted my hands, winding those bonds around my forearms until they were made fast. Then I jerked, giving a tremendous pull that used my whole body.

  When all of those bonds were straining and I was pulling with all of my weight, I took a breath. I said softly, with utter conviction, “Go. Be at peace.”

  It felt so right. I felt as if I were full of light and joy. Of rightness—or at least the opposite of wrongness. I felt clean. And a wide swath of the zombies who had been trying to get onto the patio dropped as if poleaxed.

  But there were more zombies. A lot more. I reached out and this time the bonds came eagerly to my hands, as if they were metal and I held a magnet. I took them, and spinning round and round, wrapped my whole body with them. Even as I did so, I felt a few of those threads break in bright, happy sparks—freedom found before I could gift them with it.

  Dimly, I heard Tory Abbot say, “Wulfe, stop her.” But I was too caught up in the moment to pay much attention to his words.

  The bonds let me watch Tad, clad in blackness that made him hard to see, a huge axe in his hands. I felt it hit the zombie whose bonds I held—and my awareness of Tad was gone as the zombie’s thread dissolved into fireworks followed by nothingness. If I had wanted to, I felt that I could have tracked Tad from zombie to zombie as he brought them to the final stillness and released the wrongness of their existence.

  Zee’s path through my zombie-leashes was swifter than his son’s. I felt him move like a wave of destruction, his sword singing in joy, and they released zombie after zombie to wherever they would go after their long subjugation.

  Adam. Oh, Adam was beautiful in his wrath. He danced with the dead and they fell before him like so many petals in the wind. I was tempted to stop and just watch him.

  But I had a job to do.

  I think I was a little power drunk. And maybe a bit dizzy.

  I raised my hands to the skies and twirled like a top, a naked top. I probably looked a fool. But there was no room for self-analysis in me at that moment. I turned and turned and gathered them all, all the shiny, wispy threads of spider silk and all the zombies. Every last one, every creature bound unwillingly to unnatural life, I held them in my hands, wrapped around my body.

  They would have done my bidding more eagerly than they had done the witch’s. I knew it, knew I held the power of an unstoppable army in my grasp. They could kill the witches, destroy any threat to me, to my pack, to the people I held dear. I held power in my
hands such that had never been available to me before.

  But in that moment in time, there was only one thing I wanted from them, one necessity that drove me.

  I gave them my order.

  “Go,” I whispered. “Be at peace.”

  Wulfe’s hand closed ungently on my upper arm at the moment I spoke those words.

  Two hundred fourteen . . . thirteen (as one fell beneath Adam’s fangs) sparks left their rotting corpses and flew away. Out in the darkness, the corpses dropped, abandoned puppets. Some of them I saw with my eyes; others I just felt.

  Wulfe dropped, too, and lay unmoving at my feet.

  I sat down abruptly beside him. I felt empty and aching, as though I’d been trampled by a herd of horses. Twice. The euphoria of the moment before was gone, vanished as quickly as it had come.

  I didn’t know if I’d killed Wulfe when I released the zombies. Rekilled him. Removed him from his vampiric existence. I couldn’t decide how I felt about that.

  “Passion fruit,” said Elizaveta, standing up abruptly from the chair Wulfe had tucked her into. I was almost sure the word really was “passion fruit” this time.

  I felt the flutter as her circle fell and the patio was once more open to the night. It was a little easier to see the dead covering the ground, thicker near the patio, but the whole of the yard and beyond was full of bodies. A lot of those were human-zombie bodies.

  With the zombies all deanimated, it was easy to pick out Adam, Tad, and Zee—they were the only ones left standing. Tad and Zee were turning in a wary circle, looking for a foe. Adam loped in my direction.

  Elizaveta patted my head as she passed me. “Good,” she told me. “Now it is my turn.”

  She walked slowly—no doubt hampered by the damage the witches had inflicted on her—but each step was easy and firm. She walked as if she owned the ground under her feet.

  The three witches—Death, Magda, and Abbot—were staring around them, momentarily overwhelmed by the sudden destruction of their army. There was blood dripping from Magda’s nose and the ear nearest me.

  “Stupid,” Elizaveta said in satisfied tones.

  Death recovered first. She scowled and opened her mouth.

  But before Death could say anything, Elizaveta raised her hand palm up and said, “Tory Abbot, Patience Ramsey, Magda Fischer. Die.”

  I felt it again, that moment, that instant when everything stopped. To me it felt like a club of darkness that, even not directed at me, tried to freeze the blood in my body.

  “Die,” said Elizaveta again.

  They obeyed Elizaveta, the three Hardesty witches, because there was no possibility for them to do anything else.

  They died so fast that there was not even an instant for shock or disbelief. They just dropped dead.

  I’d watched Patience use that spell to kill every living thing in Elizaveta’s house except for a cat. But Death had not lit up like a blowtorch when she consumed their lives. Elizaveta did. I had felt the magic Patience had harvested from dozens in that house the night Elizaveta’s family died. Immortal witches, Coyote had told me. And I’d known then where Death had gotten her immortality.

  But I knew for a certainty that that houseful of life had supplied her with not a tithe of what Elizaveta farmed from the three witches. I felt the filthy magic wash into her and fill her as if she were an empty vessel beneath a water spout. Power lit her from within until I had to bring my arm up and shield my eyes.

  My bones ached with the wrongness of that magic. But eventually the tide of filthy black magic faded. I brought my arm down so that I could see.

  The first thing I saw wasn’t Elizaveta, though. While I hadn’t been watching, Adam had shifted all the way back to human. He stood, naked, every muscle in his body clenched like it hurt. His eyes were shut and the muscle in his cheek was twitching. As I watched, he drew in a breath and started to relax.

  Elizaveta stood, her hand on his shoulder, beaming at him as if she had done him a favor—instead of pulling him through a full change, wolf to man, in what looked to have been an incredibly painful fashion.

  As I watched, she stepped away from him and walked to the bodies of her victims. She knelt beside them and began frisking them like a professional thief. I rolled to my feet and staggered forward.

  Elizaveta was on our side, I reminded myself. There was no reason for the anxious terror that filled me at the sight of Elizaveta’s tangled white hair darkening to sable, of her slack and bruised dermis being replaced by firm, milky skin without a wrinkle or an age spot.

  “I told you they were foolish,” Elizaveta said as she set rings, necklaces, and small bits and pieces of cloth, clay, and bone aside. They sparked as she touched them, the magic she was still absorbing bringing them to life. A life that left them as soon as she set them aside.

  “Foolish?” Adam said—because of course it was Adam she was speaking to.

  She looked up at him and the fickle firelight caught her face and bathed her in a light that was illuminating rather than blinding. The old witch no longer looked like the well-preserved seventy-year-old woman she had been. I’d always thought she would have been stunning when she was young. Beautiful. I was wrong. Her features were still too strong for that. Her nose was still hawkish and her jaw was too long.

  But I imagined that if Helen of Troy had been a real person, she might have looked like Elizaveta Arkadyevna. Elizaveta’s face could have launched a thousand ships.

  She looked away from my mate and down at herself, at skin that was smooth and taut over muscles that would have done credit to a werewolf. She stretched her long and graceful fingers, hands that belonged to a woman in her twenties.

  “She used her death-bringing spell in my home,” Elizaveta said, giving Abbot’s body one last pat-down, taking an amulet out of his pocket.

  “I have been looking for that spell ever since I first heard rumors of it—when I was as young as I look right now. And they brought it right to me.” Elizaveta stood up.

  She nudged Patience with her toe. “Foolish to work secret magic in another witch’s stronghold.” She gave Adam a flirtatious smile. “I improved it a bit.”

  He held out his hand. She put her hand in his and he kissed it.

  “Is this what it feels like to be a werewolf?” she asked him. “Nothing hurts.”

  She closed her fingers over his; a beautiful smile lit her face.

  “Adam,” she said. “I have wanted to do this for years.”

  She stepped into his space, leaned her beautiful, strong, young, and naked body against his. She was just an inch or two taller than he was, but it didn’t matter. Adam was so much wider, more solid, that she looked like a fairy princess to his warrior.

  They were beautiful.

  She tilted her face to facilitate her kiss, revealing Adam’s face to me. Just as her lips touched his, Adam’s eyes met mine.

  I couldn’t read what I saw there. Not then.

  Then he closed his eyes. He kissed her. One of his arms wrapped around her waist. The other one slid down, through her long silky hair, and cupped the back of her head.

  He snapped her neck, stepping back so that her body hit the concrete hard instead of cushioning her fall. It didn’t matter to her; she was dead. But it said a lot about how Adam felt about her.

  He looked at me and waited for my judgment.

  I knew that he had liked her. I knew that he thought of her as family, had enjoyed the verbal sparring matches they had sometimes engaged in. Enjoyed dusting off his mother’s Russian and flirting with an old woman.

  “This is our territory,” I said, giving him the words he needed. “We don’t allow black magic in our territory.”

  He closed his eyes and swallowed.

  “That’s right,” he said. When I folded him in my arms, he lifted me against him and buried his face against my neck.<
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  We held each other, surrounded by the dead.

  13

  “I can ask the earth to put them to rest,” said Zee.

  I pulled away from Adam and looked over at the old smith. He stood on the balls of his feet, looking just like he usually did: expression subtly sour as if a scowl were ready to break out at any moment. He looked like a wiry old man who’d done hard physical work his whole life and could outwork any teenager in town—not like a legendary fae who had just faced battle with a foe who had so greatly outnumbered him.

  Tad stood just beyond him. And there was an almost existential serenity gathered about his whole body. I had never seen Tad look so at peace with himself.

  “They will just dig them up,” I said prosaically. “Someone twenty or thirty years from now will decide they want to build a housing development. Stick a backhoe into the ground and—whoopsie.”

  “A lot of dead people here,” said the senator, limping very slowly over to us. “A lot of families who need closure.”

  “Too many old zombies,” Zee said. “They are a feast for the crows.”

  We must have looked blank—or I did, anyway.

  To me, Zee said, “The black-magic users will come to use their bones. I know creatures of the fae who will be drawn to their corpses. I can put them to rest in the ground so that none will find them again.”

  He looked at the senator. “The goblin king took care of the dead at your brother’s house. You won’t find the bodies of your people, either. But Uncle Mike tells me that your Ruth has photos, so you can identify them.”

  “Took care of them?” he said. Then a little less hostilely he said, “The goblin king?”

  “He would have treated them with respect,” I said, and I was sure I was right. Though what respect meant to a goblin and what it meant to Jake Campbell might not be quite the same thing. “His daughter was among the dead there. She tried to see what was going on and was killed by the witches.”

  “I see,” he said.