Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(97)

This zombie was an abomination.

Wrong.

I raised my hand toward her. Maybe it was by chance, or maybe she had felt me watching her, but she raised her eyes to mine. Hers, not its. There was something looking at me from inside those eyes. Tears gathered in my own eyes at the terrible evil of what had been done to her.

Wood scraped near me and I looked over at the table the dragon had smashed. Abbot crawled out of the shelter he’d found in the broken boards. He was wearing clothing that had once been suitable for meeting the president, but I didn’t think there was a dry cleaner in the world who could repair it now. There was blood smeared around his mouth and down the front of his shirt and pants.

“Vampire,” he said.

And he gathered power, a black mass of crafting. Witch, I thought, not zombie. He strode forward as if he hadn’t just been hiding under a pile of wood, as if he hadn’t gnawed into the senator’s leg when Campbell was tied and couldn’t defend himself. He walked like a warrior wading into a familiar battlefield.

“Wulfe!” I screamed.

Wulfe was too busy with the witches to pay attention. I didn’t know what to do. Wulfe had made it quite clear that once he’d engaged in battle, I was to stay away.

Abbot pulled a knife from a pocket, flicked it open, and cut himself. Then in a gesture that reminded me of Sherwood’s motion earlier tonight, he flung his own blood at Wulfe’s back. I was too far away and it was too dark—the firelight was tricky, full of strong light and shadows—to see if it hit Wulfe.

But it must have. Because when Abbot took all the power he’d gathered and shoved it into his voice, saying, “Vampire,” Wulfe froze.

The two witches stopped their dance midmove. I don’t know what Magda’s face looked like, because I was watching the smile bloom on Patience’s face. Death’s face. Because patience is a virtue and there was nothing good about the expression on her face.

“Oh, vampire,” Magda said. “We haven’t had a vampire like you to play with in a long time. Ours used to be fun, but now she only curls up in a corner and cries.”

And just at that moment, the dragon’s claws broke through the concrete and my attention was forced to a more immediate problem. The zombie ripped a two-foot-square chunk away from the patio and hauled it down.

For a moment I could see a hole, and then it was filled with dragon. She’d misjudged; there wasn’t enough room for her to squeeze through. But she’d already proven that Elizaveta’s circle only went down to the ground, and that the ground and concrete were no match for her. It would only take a moment for her to widen the hole.

I don’t know why I didn’t run screaming. But Coyote’s voice still rang in my head. Also, after all the sadness I felt in seeing this thing that had once been a dragon, there was no room inside me for anything else—not even healthy emotions like terror or self-preservation.

Touch is important in magic.

I reached down and put my hand on her forehead. She couldn’t quite get her shoulders and forelimbs through, but all she would have had to do was twist her head and she could have taken off my arm at the elbow.

A bond lit up between us, bright and clean, a connection both like and unlike the kinds of bonds I was more familiar with. This wasn’t pack magic. This was a thing of Coyote, who was the spirit of free agency. Of choice, for good and ill. Of death and dying.

“Go,” I told the dragon. I put power into my voice, power that I’d learned from Adam, but I didn’t need to borrow from my mate for this. This power came from my father. I whispered, because this was not a power that needed volume. “Go. Be at peace.”

“No!” It was Magda’s voice, I think. “Stop her!” The dragon went limp beneath my fingers. Her body shrank as if the flesh were nothing without the terrible magic that kept it animate. She no longer filled the hole completely; soon other zombies would break through the opening she had made.

It didn’t take long. Something ripped the dragon’s desiccating body away and a woman began to slither through. She was smaller than the dragon—there was plenty of room for her.

But I was still caught in that odd headspace where I wasn’t afraid of the zombies—I was sad for them. I reached out, but this time I didn’t try to touch her skin. This time I reached out for the threads of power that bound this zombie to the witch whose creature she was.

Instead of grasping only her threads, my fingers closed on dozens of strings. They weren’t comfortable to hold, those bonds, too full of that terrible wrongness.

My grip didn’t feel firm enough, so I twisted my hands, winding those bonds around my forearms until they were made fast. Then I jerked, giving a tremendous pull that used my whole body.

When all of those bonds were straining and I was pulling with all of my weight, I took a breath. I said softly, with utter conviction, “Go. Be at peace.”

It felt so right. I felt as if I were full of light and joy. Of rightness—or at least the opposite of wrongness. I felt clean. And a wide swath of the zombies who had been trying to get onto the patio dropped as if poleaxed.

But there were more zombies. A lot more. I reached out and this time the bonds came eagerly to my hands, as if they were metal and I held a magnet. I took them, and spinning round and round, wrapped my whole body with them. Even as I did so, I felt a few of those threads break in bright, happy sparks—freedom found before I could gift them with it.