Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(89)

I just hadn’t expected him not to use dark magic at all. It didn’t seem in keeping with the vampire I knew him to be.

“I’ve sent her creatures to . . . well, not sleep, they don’t sleep. But I’ve made them settle. They won’t notice us as we pass. She’ll have to call them to her to get them up and moving.”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “I could just break her hold. Then she couldn’t send them after us, but the circle wouldn’t hold them in. They could go on a killing spree and you’d be weeks hunting all of them down. It might be fun.”

“A disaster,” said Zee. “Keep them in and let Tad and me hunt them. We’ll keep them off you.”

Wulfe pursed his lips, then nodded. “Okeydokey. We’ll leave them be, then. But you should know that some of the zombies are very near the back of Elizaveta’s house—probably in the presence of the witches.”

In the car, he’d promised that he could quiet the zombies without any of the witches knowing what he’d done. But maybe he hadn’t expected them to be so near the witches.

“Will they have felt what you did?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said. “But they might notice that the beasties are unresponsive and wake them back up before we’re ready for them.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can you get me across the circle without alerting the witches?”

My part in our plans was that I would scout out whatever the witches were doing, come back, and make a report. Then we’d work out what to do from there.

“Think so,” he said. “Maybe. Ish.”

I rolled my eyes. “Good to know.”

And I stripped down to my skin, dropping weapons to one side and clothing to the other.

“Ni-ice,” said Wulfe in a tone that would have made Adam take off his head. “Hey, is that a wolf’s paw print or a coyote’s below your belly button?”

It was really dark out. If he was seeing my paw-print tattoo, then his night vision was as good as any wolf’s. He was a vampire, so I should have expected it.

I am not shy. Shapeshifters—werewolves or coyote shifters like me—get over things like modesty very quickly. But knowing Wulfe was staring at my tattoo made me feel vulnerable. If I were never naked where he could see me again, it would be too soon.

“Yes,” I told him.

I shifted into my coyote as quickly as I could.

Wulfe dropped to all fours at the same time. “Follow me,” he said, and crawled through the fence and into the trees.

With no choice, I followed him. Just on the other side of the trees, Wulfe put a hand out, with odd deliberation, in front of him, and then did the same with the other hand. Then he straightened his knees until he was in a London Bridge kind of arch.

“You can run over the top of me or under me,” he said. “I’m keeping the connection of the spell going—so don’t cut me in half or it will sound an alarm.”

Unwilling to have him on top of me, I ran over the top of him. He settled down on the ground without moving his hands. “Remember to come back this way,” he said. “I’ll be here. Waiting for you.” He batted his eyelashes at me and mouthed, Only you.

I put Wulfe behind me every which way I could and concentrated on traveling unseen. I didn’t make the mistake of running. Quick movement attracts the attention of prey and predator alike. I found a game trail that smelled of coyote and headed, more or less, in the direction I wanted.

Traveling down the trail meant less noise—and I wouldn’t be moving grass around. But it would also be a place that traps could be set and patrols run. The zombies were, hopefully, quiescent, but Adam wouldn’t be affected. When trying to hide, running right down the road was always the wrong decision. Except that a game trail wasn’t exactly a road. Decisions, decisions.

Decisions with Adam’s life on the line. And the senator’s. It wasn’t that I wasn’t concerned about him. We were, our pack, obliged legally and ethically to make sure he was safe. I didn’t love the senator, however. And I was pretty sure that freeing Adam of the witch’s spell—Wulfe had a harrowing suggestion on that—would make the senator safer, too.

I decided to chance it, and took the trail. I passed by a few of the witch’s zombies as I skulked toward the house. The first was a squirrel. I don’t know that I’d have noticed it except that it was standing motionless on the game trail I was following. Squirrels are seldom motionless for long—and this one wasn’t breathing.

There was a boy, about the same age as the Salas boy, the age that Aiden appeared to be. Like the squirrel, he stood absolutely still. As Wulfe had promised, the boy didn’t appear to notice me, even though I walked quite close to him.

He didn’t smell dead. Like the ogre, there was no sense of rot to him. If he hadn’t been caught in Wulfe’s spell, I wondered if I’d have realized he was a zombie at all.

Wulfe had indicated that the well-made zombies were old. I hoped this one was old. Hoped that no one in the TriCities was missing a young boy. It wasn’t particularly rational to think that the zombie would be less tragic if the child’s death had been a century ago—or yesterday. But rational people wouldn’t have been sneaking through the fields behind a house occupied by black witches, either—so there was that.