Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(19)

She glanced at Mary Jo, who was keeping back far enough to give the officer a false sense of safety. “Maybe some big werewolf will get tired of him, chew him up, and spit him out with an attitude adjustment.”

Mary Jo grinned at her.

“My, what big teeth,” said the deputy with a smile, though her hand slipped toward her gun. Funny how Little Red Riding Hood came up whenever the werewolves were about.

Mary Jo closed her mouth and wagged her tail.

A nice path opened up for us through the gathering crowd—werewolves are useful like that—and we slipped past the hordes unmolested. It wasn’t really a big group of people, maybe fifteen or twenty.

“Mr. Salas,” I said. “Mary Jo and I were able to round up all the goats. I’ll make sure they are taken care of. If anyone gives you trouble or asks you to pay for damages, you call us.” I gave him a card. “This is not your fault in any way. You are not responsible for any damages, and if someone needs to be reminded of that, my husband will take care of it.”

He took the card and looked thoughtful.

Mary Jo nudged me to get my attention, then she trotted off. I assumed that she was going to regain her human shape. I didn’t let my gaze linger on her; instead, I considered the Salases’ situation.

“Did you, your wife, or your children have any trouble with anyone lately?” I asked. “With a stranger, probably.” Certainly.

There were, I understood, several kinds of practitioners who could create zombies. But this was witchcraft. As soon as I touched the first goat, I could feel the black magic humming in my bones and turning my stomach.

Leaving aside the black magic—because there were no black-magic witches in the TriCities—no local witches would have done anything like it. They were too afraid of Elizaveta and her family. And we didn’t, to my knowledge, have anyone with this kind of power except for Elizaveta herself. Zombies took serious mojo—I knew that much.

But I couldn’t explain our local witch population to Salas or the police; I didn’t want to cause anyone to go out hunting witches. That was Elizaveta’s job.

Salas shook his head. He called a question to his wife, who shook her head. “A moment,” he said. “I will ask my son.”

“He served this country for eight years,” the blond deputy (presumably Jimmy) told us, a snap in his voice. “And he has to hide when the police come to call?”

“No,” I said. “Because there are deputies like you here.”

Salas returned to the porch, shaking his head. “No. No unusual arguments. But Santiago, my son, he says there was a lady who stopped yesterday morning while he was feeding his goats. She wanted to buy them all, all twenty, but he didn’t like her so he told her they were not for sale. He stayed inside the pen while she talked—the way he said it makes me think that maybe she wanted him to come out to her car. He told me that she sounded like one of my friends from the Corps—Porter. Porter is from Georgia.”

Southern was how the witch at Elizaveta’s sounded. I wondered if they were the same witch.

Twenty goats she couldn’t buy, twenty goats that were killed and turned into zombies. Then I had a terrible thought. If she could take the goats, why couldn’t she take the boy? And what did she need with twenty zombie goats? She didn’t even take them with her. That sounded like spite to me.

I looked at the pen that was next to the house. It was the side farthest from the house where the fence was torn open. That section of fence wasn’t visible from the road. “Did the goats damage the pen, or did that happen earlier?”

“Whoever killed the goats cut open the pen,” Salas said. “The goats were dead, so we didn’t bother to repair it.”

I wondered if the witch who had killed them had returned later that night and reanimated them, or if there was a time component. That the goats had been spelled as they died, but it had taken a few hours for them to turn to zombies.

Today that didn’t matter, but I would find out. I didn’t know as much about witches or zombies as I obviously should.

Had she taken the goats because she hadn’t been able to persuade Santiago to come to her? Consent had magical implications for most of the magic-using folk; I didn’t know how it played for witches.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that your son was smart to stay in the pen when the lady came by.”

If the witch had taken the goats, surely she would have been able to walk in and take the boy if she had wanted to. But maybe, I thought, not in the middle of the day. If Salas’s son had come out of the pen and up to her car, she could have taken him then and there with no one thinking anything of it.

Maybe the goats had been second choice.

“Tell him—Santiago? Tell Santiago that if he sees her again, he should go inside the house, lock the doors, and call the number on that card.”

His eyes narrowed and his bearing changed. It was like he had put on the same invisible cloak of readiness that Adam carried around all of the time. Deputy Jimmy had that, too. It was a matter of posture, mostly—head up, shoulders back—but also of intensity. Had Salas looked like that when I’d driven up, I’d have picked him for ex-military of some sort right off the bat.

“You think she is the one who did this? A bruja?”

I shrugged. “A witch did this, I can smell it. I don’t know who that witch was.”