Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(28)

He nodded, his face tight. He’d expected that answer, but he’d hoped for a different one.

“I don’t know how she hid it from us,” I told him, or maybe told myself. “I swear she doesn’t smell or feel like a black witch, Adam. But when I went snooping in her bedroom, there was a secret compartment in her closet.”

It had been the most interesting thing I’d found upstairs. The cubby had been well hidden, too. But it’s difficult to keep a compartment secret when it is often used and the person who is searching has the nose of a coyote.

“Did Sherwood vet that compartment before you opened it?” Adam asked sharply.

I waved a hand in reassurance. “Yes, of course he did. My guess is that she didn’t booby-trap it because she uses it too often. She keeps her working clothes there.” She’d washed the blood out but I could still smell it—blood and other things. I hoped that my hair would wash cleaner than Elizaveta’s shirt. “They smelled like death, those clothes. Like pain and rot.”

“Black magic,” Adam acknowledged with something like defeat. “F . . . Freaking son of a gun. Could they have belonged to someone else?”

“In her room?” I asked, but shook my head. “No. They also smelled like her.”

“How did she hide it from me?” Adam asked.

I didn’t think he was asking me, but I answered anyway. “She is a witch, Adam. I expect she used magic.” I swayed a little on my feet. The food had helped, but it needed a little more time to have the full effect. I’d be okay in a bit.

“I’m not an expert,” I told him. “I didn’t know they could do that—hide black magic from our senses. But she did it somehow, and she’s a witch. Makes sense it would be witchcraft. But it’s a guess.”

Adam steadied me with a hand on my back, avoiding the sore places. “Sorry, Mercy. I know you’re exhausted, but there is more that we need to go over.”

“I’m fine,” I told him. “Or I’ll be fine in a half hour or so. But if we’re going to have a drawn-out conversation, right this minute, then I need to sit down.”

Adam pulled a chair out from the table and plunked me down on it.

“The black magic is new, right?” I asked him. “Before we got together, when her house was in town, she’d have you and Jesse over for dinner sometimes. I don’t care how good she is, she couldn’t have hidden that—” Greasy cloud of magic—but the werewolves wouldn’t have felt that. “—odor that permeated the house from you.”

Adam sat next to me, absently taking my hand in his and playing with my fingers. I liked it when he touched me like that, without thought, as though there were some magnetic force between us. The only thing better was that I could touch him, whenever I wished.

Thoughtfully he said, “Right. I never even noticed when that feeling that she was a part of our pack stopped. Before we got together, for sure.”

He thought about it some more, then grunted. “Whatever she’s doing to cover up her foray into black magic, it’s powerful stuff because . . . well, just think of all the people who were on that airplane on the way to Europe. She hid it from all of us.”

“Passive magic,” I agreed. “Because I’d have noticed anything active. Some kind of charm? If you want to know how, I think you’re going to have to find an expert.”

But how Elizaveta had hidden what she’d become wasn’t at the top of his to-do list. Adam looked out the window and gripped my hand.

When he spoke it was soft with hurt. “I wonder when she . . . changed. And why.”

He liked Elizaveta. She charmed and teased him. She spoke Russian to him, like his mother had. Despite being clear-eyed about what even gray witches did to keep their power, he’d thought of Elizaveta as family, or something near to it. Adam didn’t give up on the people he cared about easily or without pain.

“Maybe it was when that sorcerer vampire scared her,” I suggested softly after a minute, when he didn’t say anything more. I hoped that if we could figure out a reason, then Adam would hurt less. “Remember? He scared her enough that she left town until he was gone.”

Sorcerers are possessed by demons, and those demons can control people who have given up following a path of goodness. That included gray witches, and certainly included black witches.

He shook his head. “No, back then I was in and out of her house a lot. So were the rest of the pack. It was almost a second HQ, because it was in town and more central than our house is. Her switch to black magic couldn’t have gone back more than a year or so.”

I’d never been inside Elizaveta’s house, either house, before. She didn’t like me much, and I was afraid of her. The combination, as I’ve observed before, did not make us friends.

“I’ve never been in her new place before today,” he said. “I’ll ask the pack and see if anyone has been in her new house, but I don’t think so. We gave her some space right after she moved, and never quite regained our old relationship.”

“She moved last year, right? Just before Christmas.”

The timing was interesting. It would have been difficult to work black magic with neighbors too close. Mundane humans wouldn’t necessarily feel the magic—though that isn’t always true—but black magic produces bodies and also smells and sounds. Things that are easier to hide when the neighbors are more distant.