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“Yes,” I told him.
I shifted into my coyote as quickly as I could.
Wulfe dropped to all fours at the same time. “Follow me,” he said, and crawled through the fence and into the trees.
With no choice, I followed him. Just on the other side of the trees, Wulfe put a hand out, with odd deliberation, in front of him, and then did the same with the other hand. Then he straightened his knees until he was in a London Bridge kind of arch.
“You can run over the top of me or under me,” he said. “I’m keeping the connection of the spell going—so don’t cut me in half or it will sound an alarm.”
Unwilling to have him on top of me, I ran over the top of him. He settled down on the ground without moving his hands. “Remember to come back this way,” he said. “I’ll be here. Waiting for you.” He batted his eyelashes at me and mouthed, Only you.
I put Wulfe behind me every which way I could and concentrated on traveling unseen. I didn’t make the mistake of running. Quick movement attracts the attention of prey and predator alike. I found a game trail that smelled of coyote and headed, more or less, in the direction I wanted.
Traveling down the trail meant less noise—and I wouldn’t be moving grass around. But it would also be a place that traps could be set and patrols run. The zombies were, hopefully, quiescent, but Adam wouldn’t be affected. When trying to hide, running right down the road was always the wrong decision. Except that a game trail wasn’t exactly a road. Decisions, decisions.
Decisions with Adam’s life on the line. And the senator’s. It wasn’t that I wasn’t concerned about him. We were, our pack, obliged legally and ethically to make sure he was safe. I didn’t love the senator, however. And I was pretty sure that freeing Adam of the witch’s spell—Wulfe had a harrowing suggestion on that—would make the senator safer, too.
I decided to chance it, and took the trail. I passed by a few of the witch’s zombies as I skulked toward the house. The first was a squirrel. I don’t know that I’d have noticed it except that it was standing motionless on the game trail I was following. Squirrels are seldom motionless for long—and this one wasn’t breathing.
There was a boy, about the same age as the Salas boy, the age that Aiden appeared to be. Like the squirrel, he stood absolutely still. As Wulfe had promised, the boy didn’t appear to notice me, even though I walked quite close to him.
He didn’t smell dead. Like the ogre, there was no sense of rot to him. If he hadn’t been caught in Wulfe’s spell, I wondered if I’d have realized he was a zombie at all.
Wulfe had indicated that the well-made zombies were old. I hoped this one was old. Hoped that no one in the Tri-Cities was missing a young boy. It wasn’t particularly rational to think that the zombie would be less tragic if the child’s death had been a century ago—or yesterday. But rational people wouldn’t have been sneaking through the fields behind a house occupied by black witches, either—so there was that.
I counted five more zombies and hoped they were set to watch the path I traveled. Hoped they weren’t evenly dispersed, because that would mean there were more zombies than even I’d estimated, based on my earlier run. Maybe too many for the old fae and his son to take care of. I drew even more comfort from the way they’d taken down the ogre zombie.
I kept my eyes away from the fire blazing up in the backyard of Elizaveta’s house because I wanted to keep my night vision. Even so, glimpses told me that it climbed into the night sky, five or six feet high, with as much abandoned fury as if there weren’t a fire ban on for fear of lighting the dry shrub steppe that surrounded us. Just last week, a fire had burned the west slope of Badger Mountain, taking a manufactured house and two empty barns with it.
The smoke smell had increased tremendously as soon as I’d crossed the ward at the edge of Elizaveta’s property. Smoke eventually overwhelmed my sense of smell—and that smoke had more than dry logs in it. Now that I was closer I could pick out various scents, most of which I did not recognize.
Herbs of some sort, I thought, though I couldn’t place them beyond that. I knew what lots of herbs smelled like normally, but didn’t make a habit of burning them. Other than it wasn’t marijuana (because that was almost an incense in college), I didn’t know what kinds of herbs they had tossed in the fire.
I also smelled burnt hair and flesh, but I tried not to think about that. The bond between Adam and me was still present. I’d hoped that if I got closer to him, it would . . . do something. Tell me something. But it just sat there—an unresponsive, greasy lump.
The noises from the backyard were oddly muted. Either my hearing was going or they had some magic working to hide what they were doing from eavesdroppers. Likely a human wouldn’t have heard a thing. Maybe they wouldn’t even have seen the fire.
The trail crossed the edge of the corner of the garden and I left it there to take the rest of the trip on my own.
I chose to go through the garden because a coyote wouldn’t stand out among the odd lumps of vegetation the same way it would in the tidy yard. I tried not to think about what the pack had found buried in the garden—I wouldn’t have eaten anything grown here on a bet, and coyotes eat pretty much anything.
Elizaveta’s garden was huge, filled with flowers, herbs, and vegetables. The sides were edged in grapevines that provided a thick cover for me. Not that anyone staring into that fire stood a chance of seeing a coyote in a garden at night, anyway.
I was making my cautious way through the pumpkin vines when I felt eyes on me. I froze. When that didn’t alleviate the feeling, I turned in a slow circle. Nothing.
I looked up.
Just in front of me, where the garden gave way to open lawn, was a scarecrow with a dead crow on its head. The crow peered at me with bright button eyes.
“Mercy,” it whispered to me with the voice a cornstalk might have, soft and dry with a bit of rattle.
12
“Mercy, what are you doing in my garden?” the bird said, then chuckled, a dry, whispery sound. “Naughty little coyote.”
Then it raised its head—the movement engendered by a flash of gray magic—and cried in a loud voice designed to carry into the house, “Coyote, coyote, coyote is here. Coyote, coyote, coyote is here.”
I slipped into the dense foliage of the grapevines and froze, hardly daring to breathe.
We’d planned for this, or something like this. Without Wulfe, we knew that I could very well trip one of the protections that Elizaveta or the witches had prepared. I had a couple of things I could do if I triggered them in such a way that my comrades would be otherwise unaware of it.
But the crow’s voice would carry well enough for the vampire to hear. Now they would try to sneak into Elizaveta’s territory the way I had just done, if they could. Zee’s glamour was, he assured us, quite up to hiding their presence unless the witches looked for magic.
