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“Hush now, miscreants,” I said. “We’re hunting witches.”
Tad, doubtless hearing the edge of utter terror that I was trying to cover up with humor, ruffled my hair. “We’ve got your back.”
“So do the zombies,” said Wulfe in a whisper that sent the hairs on the back of my neck climbing right onto the top of my head.
“Shut up, Wulfe,” I said. “I’m scared enough.”
“No,” Wulfe said, a little sadly or possibly a little smugly, “I don’t think you are.”
After that optimistic observation, we all lapsed into silence.
We could have approached from the front. Wulfe pointed out that they doubtless would have alarms all around the property. If Elizaveta had really gone over to their side, they might even have access to several circles of her protections. No, I didn’t know exactly what that meant, other than it was a bad thing.
But we voted three to one to approach from the rear—which had us traipsing through someone else’s property before we marched onto Elizaveta’s hayfield. After ten minutes of stumbling through the neighbor’s alfalfa field, I was pretty sure that Wulfe had been right, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.
Zee finally put a hand under my elbow. The old fae trod through the rough ground as if it were a flat field in daylight. Wulfe and Tad just ghosted through, too. I could have made a better show as a coyote—but that would have meant leaving my weaponry behind.
The first circle, we discovered, was halfway through Elizaveta’s neighbor’s field.
“Huh,” said Wulfe, from somewhere ahead of me.
“Hold up,” said Tad.
Zee stopped and I did, too.
Wulfe turned his head, looking at something I couldn’t see.
“That’s well done,” he said. “There’s a ward circle here.” He swept a hand ahead of him. “Well, not really a circle, more of a square—but that’s okay for something like this. Just a warning line. She’d have felt every squirrel or coyote”—he didn’t look at me—“that ran across it, but still . . .”
“She?” I asked.
“This is Elizaveta’s work,” Wulfe said. “What does it say that she has activated it?”
“Not much,” said Zee. “We can speculate, of course. Perhaps she has joined forces with them. Or perhaps they found the key to the house protections when they held Elizaveta’s family.”
“Yeah,” said Wulfe with theatrical sadness. “It doesn’t tell us much.” He scuffed his toe into the ground with exaggerated disappointment. In a five-year-old it would have been cute. In a very scary vampire it was . . . cute.
He bent down and drew a line in the dirt with his finger about two feet long. “If you will all step over the border right here?”
We did, and he brushed the marks out with his fingers.
Wulfe continued to take point. Ostensibly, this was so that he could keep an eye out for the kinds of things that we could not. Truthfully, there was no way I would have been able to let him trail behind me when I couldn’t keep track of where he was. I don’t think I was alone in that feeling.
It was Zee who held a hand up the next time. “Witch,” he said in a soft murmur, his attention focused ahead of us, “can you keep a battle quiet?”
I felt it, too. The feeling of wrongness that I was beginning to associate with zombies.
Wulfe frowned. “All of the zombies are confined to the yard,” he said.
“Evidently not,” said Zee. “Witch, keep this quiet if you can. Boy, draw your weapon. Mercy—do not try to shoot or stab this one. Your blade is fine, but it is not one of mine. It will not penetrate an ogre’s hide.”
Wulfe raised an eyebrow either in mild offense at the gruff order or in mild surprise at the knowledge that the zombie ogre was around, but he closed his eyes and began moving his hands in patterns. His fingers, I noted, were flexible, like a pianist’s—even on the hand that I’d seen Stefan cut off.
Subtle magic infused the air and the atmosphere attained that odd hollow quality that I associated with the full moon dance. Pack magic sealed the sound on such nights so that only the wolves and their prey could hear the howls of the hunt.
The ogre stepped out of the shadows, shadows that hadn’t been there because we were out in an open field where there was nothing but knee-deep alfalfa, carrying an eight-foot-long wooden fence post in one beefy hand. It brought the post smashing down on Wulfe—who took two steps to the side without ceasing his magic-making.
I had never seen an ogre in its real form before. I’d met one at Uncle Mike’s, but I’d only ever seen her in her human guise—tall, slim, and disapproving of the chaos of the birthday party we’d been celebrating. Tad’s fourteenth, as I recalled.
This ogre was eight feet tall and weighed in at probably four hundred to five hundred pounds. A stiff ruff of bright orange hair ringed its neck and then rose up the back of its head, giving the appearance of a cross between a Mohawk and the crest of a cockatoo. There were seams in its skin, tidily stitched up. One ran across its forehead. One looped its left arm—and as soon as I noted that, I could see that its left arm was a little longer and the wisps of hair growing on the forearm were dark brown. Stitches ringed both legs just below the knee . . . right where Sherwood’s leg had been taken off, I thought with a chill.
That pet who had killed the master-zombie maker that Wulfe had been so disturbingly impressed with. I wondered if it had been a werewolf.
Like, presumably, Wulfe’s stolen zombie, this one had no smell of rot. If I hadn’t had the past couple of weeks to get a good taste of what zombies smell like, I wasn’t sure I’d have picked the ogre out as a zombie. And it had used magic to conceal itself.
Mindful of Zee’s assessment of my capabilities, I drew my cutlass but took up a stance just behind and to the left of Wulfe.
“Always happy to shield a lady,” said Wulfe, a little breathlessly.
“I figure that when it’s occupied smashing you to jelly, I might get a lucky shot at its eye,” I responded. “I don’t care how tough a creature is, I’ve never seen one shake off a cutlass in its eye.”
“Okay,” said Wulfe cheerfully. “Happy to oblige by distracting the ogre with my grisly remains.”
After that first attack, though, the ogre didn’t get another chance at Wulfe. I’d seen Zee fight before. And I’d seen Tad. But I’d never seen them fight together, armed with their favorite weapons.
It hurt a little. Somewhere in my head, I had Tad pictured, always, as the bright-eyed, brash, and self-assured little boy who’d run his father’s garage by himself for weeks. His mother had just died from cancer and his father, the immortal smith, had tried to drink himself to oblivion. Tad was capable, cheery, confident—and ten years old in my head, until that fight.
