Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(98)

Dimly, I heard Tory Abbot say, “Wulfe, stop her.” But I was too caught up in the moment to pay much attention to his words.

The bonds let me watch Tad, clad in blackness that made him hard to see, a huge axe in his hands. I felt it hit the zombie whose bonds I held—and my awareness of Tad was gone as the zombie’s thread dissolved into fireworks followed by nothingness. If I had wanted to, I felt that I could have tracked Tad from zombie to zombie as he brought them to the final stillness and released the wrongness of their existence.

Zee’s path through my zombie-leashes was swifter than his son’s. I felt him move like a wave of destruction, his sword singing in joy, and they released zombie after zombie to wherever they would go after their long subjugation.

Adam. Oh, Adam was beautiful in his wrath. He danced with the dead and they fell before him like so many petals in the wind. I was tempted to stop and just watch him.

But I had a job to do.

I think I was a little power drunk. And maybe a bit dizzy.

I raised my hands to the skies and twirled like a top, a naked top. I probably looked a fool. But there was no room for self-analysis in me at that moment. I turned and turned and gathered them all, all the shiny, wispy threads of spider silk and all the zombies. Every last one, every creature bound unwillingly to unnatural life, I held them in my hands, wrapped around my body.

They would have done my bidding more eagerly than they had done the witch’s. I knew it, knew I held the power of an unstoppable army in my grasp. They could kill the witches, destroy any threat to me, to my pack, to the people I held dear. I held power in my hands such that had never been available to me before.

But in that moment in time, there was only one thing I wanted from them, one necessity that drove me.

I gave them my order.

“Go,” I whispered. “Be at peace.”

Wulfe’s hand closed ungently on my upper arm at the moment I spoke those words.

Two hundred fourteen . . . thirteen (as one fell beneath Adam’s fangs) sparks left their rotting corpses and flew away. Out in the darkness, the corpses dropped, abandoned puppets. Some of them I saw with my eyes; others I just felt.

Wulfe dropped, too, and lay unmoving at my feet.

I sat down abruptly beside him. I felt empty and aching, as though I’d been trampled by a herd of horses. Twice. The euphoria of the moment before was gone, vanished as quickly as it had come.

I didn’t know if I’d killed Wulfe when I released the zombies. Rekilled him. Removed him from his vampiric existence. I couldn’t decide how I felt about that.

“Passion fruit,” said Elizaveta, standing up abruptly from the chair Wulfe had tucked her into. I was almost sure the word really was “passion fruit” this time.

I felt the flutter as her circle fell and the patio was once more open to the night. It was a little easier to see the dead covering the ground, thicker near the patio, but the whole of the yard and beyond was full of bodies. A lot of those were human-zombie bodies.

With the zombies all deanimated, it was easy to pick out Adam, Tad, and Zee—they were the only ones left standing. Tad and Zee were turning in a wary circle, looking for a foe. Adam loped in my direction.

Elizaveta patted my head as she passed me. “Good,” she told me. “Now it is my turn.”

She walked slowly—no doubt hampered by the damage the witches had inflicted on her—but each step was easy and firm. She walked as if she owned the ground under her feet.

The three witches—Death, Magda, and Abbot—were staring around them, momentarily overwhelmed by the sudden destruction of their army. There was blood dripping from Magda’s nose and the ear nearest me.

“Stupid,” Elizaveta said in satisfied tones.

Death recovered first. She scowled and opened her mouth.

But before Death could say anything, Elizaveta raised her hand palm up and said, “Tory Abbot, Patience Ramsey, Magda Fischer. Die.”

I felt it again, that moment, that instant when everything stopped. To me it felt like a club of darkness that, even not directed at me, tried to freeze the blood in my body.

“Die,” said Elizaveta again.

They obeyed Elizaveta, the three Hardesty witches, because there was no possibility for them to do anything else.

They died so fast that there was not even an instant for shock or disbelief. They just dropped dead.

I’d watched Patience use that spell to kill every living thing in Elizaveta’s house except for a cat. But Death had not lit up like a blowtorch when she consumed their lives. Elizaveta did. I had felt the magic Patience had harvested from dozens in that house the night Elizaveta’s family died. Immortal witches, Coyote had told me. And I’d known then where Death had gotten her immortality.

But I knew for a certainty that that houseful of life had supplied her with not a tithe of what Elizaveta farmed from the three witches. I felt the filthy magic wash into her and fill her as if she were an empty vessel beneath a water spout. Power lit her from within until I had to bring my arm up and shield my eyes.

My bones ached with the wrongness of that magic. But eventually the tide of filthy black magic faded. I brought my arm down so that I could see.

The first thing I saw wasn’t Elizaveta, though. While I hadn’t been watching, Adam had shifted all the way back to human. He stood, naked, every muscle in his body clenched like it hurt. His eyes were shut and the muscle in his cheek was twitching. As I watched, he drew in a breath and started to relax.