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Right then I was more concerned by how many of them there were. For a moment, caught in our shared gaze, I felt them all—a great weight of misery that stretched across Elizaveta’s property. There weren’t ten or twenty of them. There were dozens. Hundreds. Some made with great care, others newly made and rotting already.
But they were not my task.
I closed my eyes, breaking our tie. When I opened my eyes again, I watched the dragon, but I did not look at its eyes. I moved cautiously and its gaze did not follow me. I couldn’t tell if it was still caught up in Wulfe’s spell, or if it was just indifferent to me.
There were other participants that I needed to take note of. Senator Campbell was gagged and tied to a chair, Abbot on the ground beside him. I had forgotten about Tory Abbot, the senator’s aide. I watched him, but he had his head down and wasn’t moving.
The senator was hurt. I couldn’t see anything specific because the flickering firelight hid the tones of his skin and most of him was covered by his clothes. But I could see pain in the hunch of his body.
He saw me. But he didn’t know what I was, and he probably assumed that I was another of the zombie witch’s creations, her abominations. Maybe, if he’d been paying attention to the witches’ conversation, he thought I was just a coyote. A short, sharp scream made him turn his attention away from me, toward the star of tonight’s show.
Elizaveta. They had stripped her naked and hung her upside down from the basketball hoop pole next to the house. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but the skin on her face was bruised darkly enough that I could see it, even in the poor lighting. Her white hair hung down in an untidy mess. Her arms hung limply, a few inches off the ground, bound together with heavy manacles that looked as though they belonged in a medieval dungeon.
Magda had her hands in front of her mouth, like a child in a candy store who was trying to decide which flavor was best when all of them were wonderful. She swayed a little and hummed. I’d had my eyes shut when she’d joined me in the garden, so this was the first time tonight that I took in her appearance.
She wore a light-colored, silky top with a scoop neck that was just low enough to display the triple strand of pearls that lay over her collarbone. Her slacks were darker, but her midheel pumps were the same light color as her top. Pink, I thought. But it might have been lavender. She looked as though she were dressed for a garden party fund-raiser for a high-powered politician. Or posing for a society article in a magazine, maybe titled “What the Well-Put-Together Witch Wears to an Outdoor Torture Session This Year.”
In contrast, Death looked like she was dressed for a jewelry heist. She was encased head to toe in black. But this was nothing new. The whole time I’d been with that poor cat in her laboratory, I’d never seen her in any color but black. Tonight she had on a long-sleeved, high-neck tunic top, black jeans, and silver-laced black boots that matched the ones the poppet had worn. The whip in her hand was black and she used it on Elizaveta.
Elizaveta was an old woman, in her early seventies, I thought. She was in good shape for a woman of her age—there were muscles under the thinning, slacking skin. But her age added to the indignity and horror of what they were doing to her.
Unlike the senator, Elizaveta’s skin, pale and exposed, displayed the damage they’d been doing. I hated it that somewhere in my head I could look at the welts, burns, and bruises on a naked old woman and think, They’ve been taking it easy on her tonight. And they haven’t had her up there too long. Because I knew what it looked like when the witches were really working someone over.
“Again,” said Magda. “Please, Ishtar, please. That felt like . . . better than the last witch, better than all the witches here. That felt like—”
“Power,” said Death. She hit Elizaveta again and both witches shivered with the aftereffects.
I could think of her as Death because the alternative was Ishtar—essentially calling her a goddess, which I would not do. I had never heard her real name, though I had the impression that she hated it.
“I could do this all night, Elizaveta,” crooned Death, working up a rhythm with her whip. “You probably know exactly how wonderful this feels—yes, I had some lovely talks with your people. I almost kept one or two, but in the end decided I could use the power boost more. You have that much of a reputation, which should please you.”
She paused, surveying her work. There was a certain satisfaction in her body language. She took pride, I remembered, in the evenness of her lash work.
“I could break you, Elizaveta,” she crooned. “I could destroy your flesh and drink down your power.”
Magda squeezed herself and shivered. “I like it when you do that, Ishtar. Yummy.”
Death gave her a sympathetic smile. “I know, sweetheart. But I was given a task.” She started swinging again. This time there was no rhythm in it, no way to plan for the sting.
I knew how that felt.
“I could beat you to death,” she said. “We will drink your power and your pain, and my coven would find that acceptable. Particularly when you have given us such interesting toys and spells to take home. I bet you didn’t know that your grandson knew where you kept the family spellbook, did you? Stupid of you to leave him alive so long. He died knowing that he’d gotten his revenge.”
Robert, I thought, and had an instant, unbidden memory of his featureless, scarred face.
Elizaveta was beginning to pant, though it was more from emotion than from exhaustion. “Or you can surrender. We have ten bloodlines in our coven. Yours would be the eleventh. So close to a full coven. You’ve felt our power as a victim. Wouldn’t you love to feel it as one of us? I offer you power you could only dream about without us.”
“I am Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya, of house Kikimora. I can trace my bloodline a thousand years. Never would I join your ragtag band of mutts and rejects. I know who you are, Patience Ramsey. There is no house Ramsey. You do not know from where your witchblood comes. It was present in neither your mother’s nor in her husband’s lineage. Calling yourself Death does not make you a great witch, does not make legitimate your bloodline.”
She didn’t get it all out at once. But she did pull it off without screams or grunts, and I wasn’t sure that I would have managed it if I’d been in her place. By the end of Elizaveta’s little speech, Death—Patience—was trying her best to beat Elizaveta into silence.
I wasn’t just waiting around while the witches and Elizaveta had their chat. I used the fire and their preoccupation to slide all the way around the outer edge of the patio. It was really dark tonight; the moon was a bare sliver and there was a storm in the air that was covering the stars. If anyone had been looking, they would have seen me easily. But Elizaveta was giving them enough of a show that no one thought to look.
