“He says,” the deputy told me when Salas had finished, “that they all had their throats cut. There was no sign of a struggle. Someone collected their blood.” He glanced around at the other deputies. “I think, given the circumstances, that we should believe him?” At the last he looked at me.
I shrugged. “I’m not an expert in zombies,” I told them. “I’ve never had much to do with them.” But I knew that they were witchcraft, and witchcraft was powered by body parts with a leaning toward blood and bone. “But if something weird happened, any weirdness that preceded that is probably connected. We”—I indicated Mary Jo—“can find the goats. I don’t know exactly what to do with them, but I have resources. Let me make another call.”
Elizaveta Arkadyevna was our witch on retainer. It sometimes amazes me how much of the supernatural world has adopted lawyerlike techniques. I don’t know whether that says something about lawyers—or something about the supernatural.
Elizaveta was in Europe. She’d gone to help me, and stayed when Bonarata had made her an interesting temporary job offer. But her family was still here and obliged to our pack.
I called Elizaveta’s number and a woman’s voice answered it, soft and Southern. “This is the home of Elizaveta Arkadyevna,” she said. “I’m afraid that she’s not here and her family is all tied up right now. What can I do to help you?”
No one in Elizaveta’s family had an accent like that. Elizaveta clung to her Russian accent, but everyone else sounded newscaster American, the born-in-the-Pacific-Northwest kind of voice.
I had a very bad feeling. Especially since I was pretty sure that her “all tied up” wasn’t a figure of speech. It wasn’t that I could tell if she was lying or not—over the phone, sometimes I can tell and sometimes I can’t. It was that I heard the sound of people in pain.
I cut the line. There was nothing I could say that would be useful under the circumstances. Zombies and something off at our local witch’s home. Coincidences are always possible, even if unlikely.
I thought a moment and called Adam. His voice mail picked up again and I said, “We have miniature zombie goats in Benton City and when I called Elizaveta’s house, a strange woman with a thick Southern accent picked up the phone. Background noises suggest that Elizaveta’s family is in trouble.” Then I called Darryl.
Darryl Zao was our pack’s second. Unless you included me, who, as Adam’s mate, was technically above Darryl. Our pack’s ranks were currently a little convoluted as tradition belatedly met women’s liberation and sputtered. The road to enlightenment was a little bumpy, but we were on the right path.
Anyway, I called Darryl. He’d be up. He ran every morning at six A.M.
He answered, his voice distorted by his car’s phone system. “Yes.”
I explained the situation to him. “I have the goats covered, more or less. We’ll figure out what to do with them until better-educated minds can be put to the problem.”
“I’ll grab a few wolves and head over to Elizaveta’s,” he said.
“Just recon,” I told him. “Unless Adam picks up his phone or listens to the message I just gave him. See what is going on over there. Then we contact the wicked witch herself and let her make the calls. There are witches who can control wolves,” I reminded him.
He paused. “Should I bring Post, or leave him out of it?”
I frowned. “He doesn’t remember anything. Why bring him in?”
Sherwood Post (not his real name—but it would do until he figured out what that was) had been discovered when the Seattle pack cleaned out a nasty coven of witches. It had taken a while for him to regain human form—and he was never able to regenerate one of his legs, which was weird. Werewolves either regenerate or they die. He didn’t remember anything and no one knew who he was except (we all thought) Bran, the Marrok. Bran had gifted Sherwood with his unusual name and sent him off to our pack.
“Because,” said Darryl, “he’s sitting right next to me.”
“Well, then,” I told him, exasperated. “Ask him if he wants to go or not. Take him if he wants to go, drop him off somewhere if he doesn’t. This isn’t a war mission, it’s a recon. We’ve got enough on our plate. We’ll leave any warfare to Elizaveta unless she asks otherwise.”
“Problems?” asked the Spanish-speaking deputy.
“I hope not,” I said. “But I think we’re on our own.”
3
Mary Jo and I spent the next couple of hours catching adorable zombie goats. She could just pick them up in her massive jaws and deliver them. I had to let my coyote find them, then shift back to my human self to catch and carry them back. They might be small for goats, but the adults weighed nearly what my coyote did.
Luckily I usually carried a backpack in my car that I could shove my clothes into. Otherwise, I’d have spent the morning walking around naked, carrying dead goats with red eyes and a taste for blood.
Not that the zombies could actually eat anything. In the first place, their throats were cut. One of the adults I’d caught was so deeply wounded that its head just lolled around; there was no muscle to move its neck. In the second place, they were dead. No systems go. But it didn’t stop them from causing lots of mayhem. Small animals—squirrels, quail, chickens, and the like—didn’t fare well. I would have thought that zombies would be slow, like in the movies. But these, at least, were not.
Because we were using our animal forms, we had to leave our phones in the car. I had to trust that Adam got my messages and that Darryl was staying safe.
I finally figured out that Darryl would rather have left Sherwood behind, and he’d been hoping that I would give the order. It was interesting that Adam’s second didn’t feel comfortable giving orders to Sherwood, who was, supposedly, below him in the pack structure. I tried to figure out whether that was a new thing or not, but then I detected another zombie miniature goat.
Detected, not scented. I put that aside, too.
Darryl and Sherwood had their jobs; Mary Jo and I had ours. Mine was to find as many of the miniature zombie goats as I could, not to explore too hard how I was finding them. Concentrate on the job at hand and sort everything else out later.
I found my last escapee about two miles from the Salases’ house. It was a baby goat, black with a big white spot in the middle of its chest, nearly as short as the dachshund it was attacking. And I didn’t find this one because of my coyote nose, either.
The goat must have backtracked, because the scent I was following continued down the road. But I felt the zombie and it was directly on my left. I stopped running but stayed where I was.