He had a pair of hatchets, one in each hand, and a bigger axe strapped to his back. The tunic rippled light so it was difficult to keep track of him, so I mostly saw him in snatches of still movement—midleap six feet in the air throwing one of the hatchets. That hatchet ended up in the ogre’s left elbow. The next time I caught a glimpse of him, he was rolling on the ground to get beneath the stroke of that big fence post. He was beautiful and deadly—and decidedly not an innocent, if competent, ten-year-old boy.
If Tad was shadow, then Zee was sunlight. His sword blazed orange and red and hissed as it drew dark lines on the ogre’s skin, howled when it slid through flesh and bone. Zee didn’t drop his glamour, and it would have been odd for someone who didn’t know who and what he was to see an old man moving with such grace and power. He didn’t appear to move fast or use any particular effort. He’d step back and the fence post would slide by his face—not by inches but by millimeters. He simply moved his hand and his sword would cut through the ogre’s knee joint as if it were cheese, leaving the ogre’s severed flesh burning sullenly on both sides of the cut.
It was an amazing, beautiful, fearful dance and it didn’t take them a full minute to disable and then, with a smooth, full-bodied swing of the deadly blazing sword, behead the ogre. Zee’s sword quit blazing and left us in a darkness that seemed darker than before he’d drawn his weapon.
Wulfe stepped forward and touched the body, pulling out a tuft of the red bristle. He spoke a few words and then planted the hair in the ground.
“She’ll not know it’s gone for a while,” Wulfe said. “My wards kept her from feeling its demise and this will keep its leash from springing back to her. But if she looks for it, she’ll know it’s gone.”
“The ogre clans in Scotland had a young one go missing a few centuries back,” murmured Zee. “I’ll let them know that we found him and gave him release.”
I don’t know how anyone else was affected by that fight. Zee seemed, if anything, more somber. Tad’s battle alertness precluded me reading anything else off him. And Wulfe, Wulfe was himself. But I felt a little more hopeful at the evidence of my comrades’ capabilities. Anyone who could kill a zombie ogre might not be hopeless against a pair of witches, right?
* * *
• • •
Elizaveta’s boundary fence was marked by a row of poplars thick enough to block her neighbors’ observation. It also kept us from having a good view of anything happening near the house.
“There’s a fire over there,” said Tad softly. “In the backyard, I think.”
He was right. The light flickering through the trees had too much movement in it to be coming from a lightbulb.
“Elizaveta had a firepit built in the center of her patio in the backyard,” I said. The patio was large, the size of half of a basketball court, which was what its previous owners had used it for. The basketball hoop was still there, but the firepit made future basketball games unlikely.
I could smell a bit of smoke and some burned things that weren’t anything I’d scented in a campfire. But there was something wrong. This close, the scent should have been a lot stronger.
“Fire is a good aid to magic of any kind,” Zee commented. “Perhaps they are trying to work something now?”
Wulfe closed his eyes and raised a hand—the one that Stefan had cut off—palm out toward Elizaveta’s house.
“I don’t know what they are doing at the moment,” he said. “But they aren’t keeping a leash on their dead things. They’ve just let them wander inside the circle Elizaveta laid around the place.” He tutted. “Careless of them. Wait up a minute.”
There was a rush of magic that fluttered by me like a storm of tree leaves. A much more powerful burst of magic than I’d ever felt from him, so I was able to get a better sense of his magic than I had before. It did not smell like black witchcraft . . . or gray witchcraft, either. It smelled clean as the driven snow.
Wulfe was a white witch?
It boggled my mind. I’d seen him torture and kill with my own two eyes. I expected gray. Black magic I’d have noticed, but gray magic doesn’t actually smell that different from vampire magic.
As a vampire, he could coax willing cooperation from any human he fed from. I’d seen him do it. I’d seen them beg him to torture them (there are a lot of reasons Wulfe is at the top of my scary monster chart). He didn’t need to use black magic if he didn’t want to.
I just hadn’t expected him not to use dark magic at all. It didn’t seem in keeping with the vampire I knew him to be.
“I’ve sent her creatures to . . . well, not sleep, they don’t sleep. But I’ve made them settle. They won’t notice us as we pass. She’ll have to call them to her to get them up and moving.”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “I could just break her hold. Then she couldn’t send them after us, but the circle wouldn’t hold them in. They could go on a killing spree and you’d be weeks hunting all of them down. It might be fun.”
“A disaster,” said Zee. “Keep them in and let Tad and me hunt them. We’ll keep them off you.”
Wulfe pursed his lips, then nodded. “Okeydokey. We’ll leave them be, then. But you should know that some of the zombies are very near the back of Elizaveta’s house—probably in the presence of the witches.”
In the car, he’d promised that he could quiet the zombies without any of the witches knowing what he’d done. But maybe he hadn’t expected them to be so near the witches.
“Will they have felt what you did?” I asked.
“Nah,” he said. “But they might notice that the beasties are unresponsive and wake them back up before we’re ready for them.”
“Okay,” I said. “Can you get me across the circle without alerting the witches?”
My part in our plans was that I would scout out whatever the witches were doing, come back, and make a report. Then we’d work out what to do from there.
“Think so,” he said. “Maybe. Ish.”
I rolled my eyes. “Good to know.”
And I stripped down to my skin, dropping weapons to one side and clothing to the other.
“Ni-ice,” said Wulfe in a tone that would have made Adam take off his head. “Hey, is that a wolf’s paw print or a coyote’s below your belly button?”
It was really dark out. If he was seeing my paw-print tattoo, then his night vision was as good as any wolf’s. He was a vampire, so I should have expected it.
I am not shy. Shapeshifters—werewolves or coyote shifters like me—get over things like modesty very quickly. But knowing Wulfe was staring at my tattoo made me feel vulnerable. If I were never naked where he could see me again, it would be too soon.