Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(90)

I counted five more zombies and hoped they were set to watch the path I traveled. Hoped they weren’t evenly dispersed, because that would mean there were more zombies than even I’d estimated, based on my earlier run. Maybe too many for the old fae and his son to take care of. I drew even more comfort from the way they’d taken down the ogre zombie.

I kept my eyes away from the fire blazing up in the backyard of Elizaveta’s house because I wanted to keep my night vision. Even so, glimpses told me that it climbed into the night sky, five or six feet high, with as much abandoned fury as if there weren’t a fire ban on for fear of lighting the dry shrub steppe that surrounded us. Just last week, a fire had burned the west slope of Badger Mountain, taking a manufactured house and two empty barns with it.

The smoke smell had increased tremendously as soon as I’d crossed the ward at the edge of Elizaveta’s property. Smoke eventually overwhelmed my sense of smell—and that smoke had more than dry logs in it. Now that I was closer I could pick out various scents, most of which I did not recognize.

Herbs of some sort, I thought, though I couldn’t place them beyond that. I knew what lots of herbs smelled like normally, but didn’t make a habit of burning them. Other than it wasn’t marijuana (because that was almost an incense in college), I didn’t know what kinds of herbs they had tossed in the fire.

I also smelled burnt hair and flesh, but I tried not to think about that. The bond between Adam and me was still present. I’d hoped that if I got closer to him, it would . . . do something. Tell me something. But it just sat there—an unresponsive, greasy lump.

The noises from the backyard were oddly muted. Either my hearing was going or they had some magic working to hide what they were doing from eavesdroppers. Likely a human wouldn’t have heard a thing. Maybe they wouldn’t even have seen the fire.

The trail crossed the edge of the corner of the garden and I left it there to take the rest of the trip on my own.

I chose to go through the garden because a coyote wouldn’t stand out among the odd lumps of vegetation the same way it would in the tidy yard. I tried not to think about what the pack had found buried in the garden—I wouldn’t have eaten anything grown here on a bet, and coyotes eat pretty much anything.

Elizaveta’s garden was huge, filled with flowers, herbs, and vegetables. The sides were edged in grapevines that provided a thick cover for me. Not that anyone staring into that fire stood a chance of seeing a coyote in a garden at night, anyway.

I was making my cautious way through the pumpkin vines when I felt eyes on me. I froze. When that didn’t alleviate the feeling, I turned in a slow circle. Nothing.

I looked up.

Just in front of me, where the garden gave way to open lawn, was a scarecrow with a dead crow on its head. The crow peered at me with bright button eyes.

“Mercy,” it whispered to me with the voice a cornstalk might have, soft and dry with a bit of rattle.





12





“Mercy, what are you doing in my garden?” the bird said, then chuckled, a dry, whispery sound. “Naughty little coyote.”

Then it raised its head—the movement engendered by a flash of gray magic—and cried in a loud voice designed to carry into the house, “Coyote, coyote, coyote is here. Coyote, coyote, coyote is here.”

I slipped into the dense foliage of the grapevines and froze, hardly daring to breathe.

We’d planned for this, or something like this. Without Wulfe, we knew that I could very well trip one of the protections that Elizaveta or the witches had prepared. I had a couple of things I could do if I triggered them in such a way that my comrades would be otherwise unaware of it.

But the crow’s voice would carry well enough for the vampire to hear. Now they would try to sneak into Elizaveta’s territory the way I had just done, if they could. Zee’s glamour was, he assured us, quite up to hiding their presence unless the witches looked for magic.

I waited for someone, anyone, to hunt for me.

Instead, there was a pop, more of a pressure release than an actual noise. The fire got louder and I heard, for the first time, the witches’ voices quite clearly. Another ward had gone down, somewhere between me and the porch.

“Did you hear that, Elizaveta, darlin’?” said Death in a sticky sweet voice. “You have a vermin problem in your garden?”

At the sound of her voice, my soul grew still, grew focused. For the first time since I’d walked into Uncle Mike’s, I wasn’t afraid.

For weeks, buried in the poor half-grown kitten’s head, I had let her hurt us, hurt others, because I was helpless to do anything else. I had had to bear mute witness to the foulness of her actions. Tonight we were going to stop her.

The skin on my muzzle wrinkled and I had to fight back a growl.

“What was that?” asked Magda, the zombie witch, just as the crow sounded off again. She wasn’t talking about any sound I’d made—she was talking about the crow-thing, because I hadn’t made any noise.

I could feel the animated crow’s attention brush by me, but I was out of its area of perception now. It settled back into an inanimate object with a mutter of indignation and a ruffle of its feathers. This wasn’t a zombie; there was no semblance of life, no smell of wrongness. It was merely a simulacrum designed to warn intruders off. Elizaveta’s work—its voice had sounded like the old witch trying to mimic what a crow might sound like, assuming the crow was Russian, and it smelled like Elizaveta’s magic.