Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(61)

Elizaveta nodded. “I concur.”

Tad came into the garage and, after Adam disconnected, he nodded at what Elizaveta was examining.

“A voodoo doll?” he asked.

She made a negative noise, but then said, “Of a sort, I suppose. Though this is nothing so crude as that, nor does it rely on sympathetic magic. This is something of a higher art.”

She looked at me. “I’m surprised you weren’t killed outright.”

“I was wearing nitrile gloves when I picked up the air filter,” I said, approaching to examine the doll with morbid curiosity.

She snorted. “I don’t know why that curse didn’t touch you—but it wasn’t a silly pair of plastic gloves.”

“Nitrile,” said Zee sourly. “They were not plastic.”

She ignored him, which I think was his point. There is more than one way to be unseen. If he’d been skulking in the background saying nothing at all, she might wonder about him later. If he made annoying and not too germane comments, then she’d simply dismiss him as unimportant.

Her mistake—but not one she was alone in.

Up close, the doll was unquestionably handmade, from its fabric face to its intricate clothing. Tiny, precise seams edged the black lace dress, and a plethora of black beads littered the frilly skirts. Her silk head was crowned with black and dark brown yarn confined in two even braids. Even the shoes were detailed: tiny boots laced with silvery embroidery thread. Her face was a smooth blank canvas of silk.

Looking at the braids, I asked, “Is that supposed to be me?”

She pursed her lips. “No. It represents the witch who wanted to curse you.” She picked up the doll’s hand to show me that a strand of black hair had been stitched into the fabric there. “This is you—to symbolize the one the curse was aimed at. I don’t understand why whatever it was on the car part—”

“Air filter,” said Zee.

She ignored him and kept talking. “—didn’t do anything to you.” She frowned at me as if that were something she deemed worse than a strange witch putting a death curse on my place of business.

“Is that safe?” asked Adam, nodding to the doll Elizaveta held.

She looked at it as if she’d forgotten what she held. “No, actually.” She glanced over her shoulder and then seemed to realize that none of her usual minions were there. She looked around and her eyes found me. “Mercy, you must have something like a torch we can use to burn this, yes?”

“I do,” I agreed.

We had been doing a lot of burning lately.



* * *



? ? ?

We burned the little doll in the dirt section of the parking lot where I kept a few cars I stripped for parts. It was daylight, so the burning shouldn’t attract much attention. To make sure of that, we picked a spot where the junker cars blocked the line of sight to the road.

I half expected the wet doll to be difficult to ignite. But Tad doused it with gasoline, and it seemed to catch fire easily enough. Tad was ignoring his burnt hands, which looked terribly painful.

I thought about why the curse hadn’t hit me.

I was Coyote’s daughter, which made me one of the walkers, people who were descended from the avatars of the first people: Coyote, Wolf, Raven, and the like. We could all assume the aspect of our ancestor—I could turn into a coyote. My friend Hank descended from Hawk and he could take that shape and fly. Otherwise we mostly all had different talents except for the two we all shared: we could see ghosts, and magic acted oddly around us.

Vampiric magic almost never affected me. I don’t know how it affected Hank because, as he liked to tell me, “I don’t hang out with those folk. They come near me and I skedaddle away.” The other thing he liked to tell me was “I am lucky to be Hawk’s get. Luckier than you. And we are both luckier than someone who descends from Iktomi.”

I had to agree with Hank. Iktomi was Spider, who tended to be a trickster like Raven and Coyote, though with a crueler edge than either of them.

The witch’s magic had not wanted to work on Arnoldo Salas, and we’d been assuming it was because he was a witch. Maybe that was so—or maybe it was because he was like me. I didn’t know if I would recognize another walker. I hadn’t met enough of them to be sure.

But I didn’t see how the witches could know that about me . . . unless one of Elizaveta’s family had told them so. While I was still shaking things up in my head, Adam asked Elizaveta the question I’d been working on.

“Why attack Mercy?” he said.

Elizaveta said, “Not now, beloved. Let me see this thing done and we can talk.” She was walking around the burning doll clockwise, very slowly. After she finished speaking, she began to walk backward, counterclockwise. Widdershins. And she sang a little song in Russian.

The doll, for all that it had caught fire, did not seem to be burning as quickly as I’d have expected from the materials it was composed from.

Elizaveta’s magic didn’t feel like the same magic that Sherwood had used on the zombie werewolf. But the music, like his, had power if not beauty. I found it jarring, like someone was petting my fur backward.

And it reeked of black magic, foul and sticky.

I grimaced at Adam. “I’m going to go back and clean up the shop.”