Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(65)

“Sorry,” I said, “I was distracted by the scenery. What did you say?”

He grinned at me, showing a flash of dimple. “I said, what if we assume that Frost wasn’t stupid?”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Let’s say that he was a witchborn vampire,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“It’s like your miniature zombie goats,” he said. “The important thing isn’t the ‘miniature’ or the ‘goat,’ it’s the ‘zombie.’ With Frost, the important thing isn’t the ‘vampire.’ It’s the ‘witchborn.’ If we look at it like that, then he was engineering the downfall of werewolves and vampires.”

I nodded. “And then he wasn’t being stupid. So what does that have to do with what the witches are trying now?”

“Damned if I know,” he said, after a long moment.

I pulled the covers up under my chin. “Me, either. But it clears up a few things.”

“So that was what was keeping you up?” Adam asked.

I nodded.

“You can sleep now?”

“And so can you,” I promised.

Adam shook his head slowly and lowered his brows, his eyes flashing gold for a moment. “Nudge,” he said.



* * *



? ? ?

I fell right asleep afterward, feeling warm and comfortable and safe.

That didn’t last long.

I dreamed that I was walking along a road. It seemed familiar, somehow. I couldn’t quite place it until I realized that there was someone walking with me.

“You could have picked anywhere,” I told Coyote. “Why did you choose a dirt road in the middle of Finley?”

Coyote stopped walking and I turned to face him.

“Because,” he said soberly, “it is better to come home.”

I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

“I have,” he said, “some information for you.”

“What is that?” I asked.

Coyote didn’t answer me in words.



* * *



? ? ?

I was locked in a cage with my brother, and I hurt. I was scared and he was scared and we huddled together in joined misery. We lived in moment-to-moment terror, waiting in dread for when we were taken out of the cages again. When the new witches came, when the old ones screamed out their lives, I was glad because I thought they’d forget about us.

I was wrong.

It took me a while to come to myself enough to realize what had happened. Coyote had put me into the mind of Sherwood’s cat sometime before the Hardesty witches killed Elizaveta’s people. I was dreaming, I remembered, so all I had to do was wake up.

But I couldn’t wake up.

Time did not speed up like it did in normal dreams. Minutes crept by like minutes. Hours were hours. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to move—but my catself cleaned my brother’s face so he’d know he wasn’t alone. It comforted us. All three of us.

The cat became aware of me at some point. He didn’t seem frightened by having a visitor inside his head, though I couldn’t communicate with him very well. I crooned to him while the witches did their work, harvesting our misery. I don’t know if he heard me or not.

“Amputation and mutilation are not effective,” the witch the others called Death told the young woman who had taken our eye with disapproval. “The shock can kill the animal, and that is a waste of potential magic to be harvested. They aren’t human, and they don’t realize that you have done permanent damage, so there is no additional boost from emotional trauma.”

The cat and I disagreed with her. But we didn’t tell her so.

The other witch, who was Elizaveta’s kin, who had spent the last few days learning from Death, prodded our new wound and then coated it with a paste that made us cry piteously.

In my human life I had found that witch dead (will have found her dead) in the workroom of Elizaveta’s house. Militza. I was not sorry that she would die.

The cat’s senses were different from my coyote’s, from my human ones. He could see the ghosts better than I could, and he saw the witches as entirely different from the humans. The witches mostly appeared oddly twisted—not visually, but to some other sense I could find no human correlation for. I knew, because the cat knew.

Death, on the other hand, was a black hole so dense that we shivered from the icy cold of it. She was scary on a level that if we could have willed ourselves to die before she ever touched us again, we would have.

The zombie witch was there, too. She had a touch of that fathomless void that watched us as we watched it. We grew to know her, as we did Elizaveta’s witches. But because I knew that they all died, the cat and I ignored Elizaveta’s family and watched the Hardesty witches. We learned who they were and what they wanted, and it terrified us.

After a number of days had passed, I forgot that I was not the cat.

When Death stopped the world, I huddled with my brother and felt the life leave his body. I waited for her to take me, too. I felt her magic sweep over me, but it could not take hold. I hid against my dead brother and tried not to attract her notice.



* * *



? ? ?

My face was pressed against gravel, my paws . . . fingers dug into the ground as I curled tighter into myself and sobbed for my dead brother, making hoarse, ugly sounds. I cried for the creatures who died to feed Death’s appetite, and I cried for the darkness in the world.