Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(99)

Elizaveta stood, her hand on his shoulder, beaming at him as if she had done him a favor—instead of pulling him through a full change, wolf to man, in what looked to have been an incredibly painful fashion.

As I watched, she stepped away from him and walked to the bodies of her victims. She knelt beside them and began frisking them like a professional thief. I rolled to my feet and staggered forward.

Elizaveta was on our side, I reminded myself. There was no reason for the anxious terror that filled me at the sight of Elizaveta’s tangled white hair darkening to sable, of her slack and bruised dermis being replaced by firm, milky skin without a wrinkle or an age spot.

“I told you they were foolish,” Elizaveta said as she set rings, necklaces, and small bits and pieces of cloth, clay, and bone aside. They sparked as she touched them, the magic she was still absorbing bringing them to life. A life that left them as soon as she set them aside.

“Foolish?” Adam said—because of course it was Adam she was speaking to.

She looked up at him and the fickle firelight caught her face and bathed her in a light that was illuminating rather than blinding. The old witch no longer looked like the well-preserved seventy-year-old woman she had been. I’d always thought she would have been stunning when she was young. Beautiful. I was wrong. Her features were still too strong for that. Her nose was still hawkish and her jaw was too long.

But I imagined that if Helen of Troy had been a real person, she might have looked like Elizaveta Arkadyevna. Elizaveta’s face could have launched a thousand ships.

She looked away from my mate and down at herself, at skin that was smooth and taut over muscles that would have done credit to a werewolf. She stretched her long and graceful fingers, hands that belonged to a woman in her twenties.

“She used her death-bringing spell in my home,” Elizaveta said, giving Abbot’s body one last pat-down, taking an amulet out of his pocket.

“I have been looking for that spell ever since I first heard rumors of it—when I was as young as I look right now. And they brought it right to me.” Elizaveta stood up.

She nudged Patience with her toe. “Foolish to work secret magic in another witch’s stronghold.” She gave Adam a flirtatious smile. “I improved it a bit.”

He held out his hand. She put her hand in his and he kissed it.

“Is this what it feels like to be a werewolf?” she asked him. “Nothing hurts.”

She closed her fingers over his; a beautiful smile lit her face.

“Adam,” she said. “I have wanted to do this for years.”

She stepped into his space, leaned her beautiful, strong, young, and naked body against his. She was just an inch or two taller than he was, but it didn’t matter. Adam was so much wider, more solid, that she looked like a fairy princess to his warrior.

They were beautiful.

She tilted her face to facilitate her kiss, revealing Adam’s face to me. Just as her lips touched his, Adam’s eyes met mine.

I couldn’t read what I saw there. Not then.

Then he closed his eyes. He kissed her. One of his arms wrapped around her waist. The other one slid down, through her long silky hair, and cupped the back of her head.

He snapped her neck, stepping back so that her body hit the concrete hard instead of cushioning her fall. It didn’t matter to her; she was dead. But it said a lot about how Adam felt about her.

He looked at me and waited for my judgment.

I knew that he had liked her. I knew that he thought of her as family, had enjoyed the verbal sparring matches they had sometimes engaged in. Enjoyed dusting off his mother’s Russian and flirting with an old woman.

“This is our territory,” I said, giving him the words he needed. “We don’t allow black magic in our territory.”

He closed his eyes and swallowed.

“That’s right,” he said. When I folded him in my arms, he lifted me against him and buried his face against my neck.

We held each other, surrounded by the dead.





13





“I can ask the earth to put them to rest,” said Zee.

I pulled away from Adam and looked over at the old smith. He stood on the balls of his feet, looking just like he usually did: expression subtly sour as if a scowl were ready to break out at any moment. He looked like a wiry old man who’d done hard physical work his whole life and could outwork any teenager in town—not like a legendary fae who had just faced battle with a foe who had so greatly outnumbered him.

Tad stood just beyond him. And there was an almost existential serenity gathered about his whole body. I had never seen Tad look so at peace with himself.

“They will just dig them up,” I said prosaically. “Someone twenty or thirty years from now will decide they want to build a housing development. Stick a backhoe into the ground and—whoopsie.”

“A lot of dead people here,” said the senator, limping very slowly over to us. “A lot of families who need closure.”

“Too many old zombies,” Zee said. “They are a feast for the crows.”

We must have looked blank—or I did, anyway.

To me, Zee said, “The black-magic users will come to use their bones. I know creatures of the fae who will be drawn to their corpses. I can put them to rest in the ground so that none will find them again.”