Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(92)

Adam nodded.

“Go back there and look like nothing is wrong,” Wulfe said. “I plan on making an entrance and then killing the witches. Mercy was going to see if she could manage to touch you—because I was pretty sure, given how mate bonds work, that would allow her to lend you her natural talent. Then she was going to go plant herself out of sight, where she would watch for an opportunity to get the senator out of harm’s way. And looky, now there are both of you to save the senator, while yours truly bears the brunt of the battle.”

He left out the way I was going to help kill the witches. Wulfe was not stupid. Bat-in-the-belfry bizarre, maybe. Psychopathic, certainly. But not stupid.

Adam thought about Wulfe’s plan. Then he made a chuffing sound and gave a pointed look all around us. I could smell them, too. He paused, because there was a zombie standing twenty feet away.

She could see us, but she didn’t do anything but watch. This one, I was afraid, was someone they had killed here. She was not well made; there was a rotting patch in the center of her right cheek through which I could see her teeth and tongue. She was about Jesse’s age.

“Wulfe spelled them to inattentiveness for now,” I told Adam. “It won’t hold if the witch calls them. But Zee and Tad are out here, too. Their part is to take care of the zombies. They already took care of the ogre.”

Adam tilted his head to me, and our mate bond rang with his warning.

“Something worse than the ogre?” I said. “Do you think that Zee will be overmatched?”

He considered that. I felt quite clearly that he wasn’t sure—but he decided to trust them.

A piercing whistle carried over the grounds. Adam’s muzzle wrinkled and he turned his head, eyes glittering.

“Easy there,” I said. “Do you think you can get the wolf to fake obedience?”

The wolf was the one who answered me. How could I doubt that he, who was such a patient hunter, could wait out the witches? He could lie in wait for days if necessary.

Adam had no ego—confidence, but no arrogance. The same was not true of his wolf.

I smiled and kissed his nose, wolf and man with the same caress, then let the change take me to my coyote form.

“I’ll go let the others know that we have Adam,” Wulfe said. “I’ll meet you by the garden.”

Back to plan A with improved odds. I felt pretty good about that.

Adam ran back to the witches and I trotted behind him, veering off when we got to the garden. I was careful not to alert the crow, tucking myself under another raspberry bush.

I listened to the witches greet Adam on his return. They came to the conclusion we had expected from them. Then they resumed whatever they were doing that sounded like something wet hitting skin. Sometimes there were hissing sounds, and that was when I smelled burnt flesh.

I caught the scent of something else from that direction—a zombie. The sense of wrongness from this one made me feel vaguely ill, just from the awareness that it was present. As careful as I was to examine the scent, I couldn’t put a familiar name to the kind of creature it was. It smelled almost fae, but not. Like fire magic, I thought. The hot, bitter scent of Zee’s iron-kissed magic was something akin to it, too.

I had waited for maybe fifteen minutes before I decided I needed to see what awaited me on that porch.

I tensed to rise to my feet, when Wulfe’s hand came down on my back. I couldn’t scent him or see him, but I knew who it was. I don’t know how I knew . . . That wasn’t quite true. I didn’t want to understand how I knew it was Wulfe.

I see ghosts. But I know when a vampire is about, too. My kind used to hunt vampires when they first came to this country. It’s why there aren’t very many of us—the vampires were better hunters, and there were more of them.

But I knew it was Wulfe, so I didn’t yip or do anything to draw the witches’ attention back to the garden. My clothes dropped in a pile on the ground next to me, along with my gun and my cutlass.

“Don’t try using the gun on the witches,” Wulfe breathed into my ear. “It won’t work.”

His voice in my ear was weird because I couldn’t sense him with my normal senses, just with that odd gift I used to find the dead. I didn’t like having that connection to him. I didn’t want any connection to Wulfe.

I got to my feet and slunk along the ground toward the huge patio where there would have been room for the whole pack to congregate. There was plenty of room for a few witches, a senator, a werewolf, and a . . . I stopped moving because I simply couldn’t make myself look away.

Curled up next to Adam, and nearly double his bulk, was . . . a something. It was covered in iridescent white scales about six inches across. I couldn’t see its head, only a single silver-and-purple-laced wing—the other presumably on the other side of the dragon.

I put my head back down, and with even more care than before, I moved from one spot of darkness to the next—but it didn’t matter. Everyone on that patio was focused on something that wasn’t a coyote ghosting in the dark—or a freaking dragon zombie. I could feel their focus with the same hunter’s instinct that had kicked in when Elizaveta’s crow had detected me. While I was moving, all I cared about—aside from the dragon—was that no one was looking for me.

I didn’t look directly at the occupants of the patio until I’d come around to where the firepit wasn’t between me and them. Then I took it all in with a single encompassing look, before I let my gaze fall to the side.