I jumped up as the dragon writhed and Adam knocked the creature away from me. The battle was a long way from over, but Adam could fight now, instead of just trying to keep its mouth safely closed. Triumphantly, I dashed across the patio to stop a handbreadth from Elizaveta. Half laughing in exhilaration, I briefly caught Elizaveta’s gaze, but her attention slid past me and over my shoulder. The firelight brightened on her face for an instant and I saw her pupils flare.
“She’s called them all,” she said.
I whirled.
Of course, I thought, the boy zombie I’d killed was no longer settled under Wulfe’s thrall. That meant they had been called. All of them, a lot more than a hundred.
I could feel them stirring beneath the tug of Magda’s words. Their twisted unnatural state was a sadness that dragged at my heart.
They were running at us—and Elizaveta called out something that sounded like “passion fruit” but equally well could have been something in Russian. Elizaveta could speak English with the precision of a BBC newscaster. But today, her Russian accent was full bore, and that meant I was more than usually likely to misunderstand what she said.
Magic rippled, leaving the air taut with something that felt to my overheated senses like anticipation. A zombie, the first of dozens, made it to the edge of the concrete and ran into an invisible barrier, as did the teeming mass of zombies that followed it. Adam and the dragon had not confined their battle royal to the patio. When Elizaveta had brought up her spell, a warding that followed the edge of the concrete, both Adam and the dragon were on the other side of that barrier.
“They cannot come through my magic,” Elizaveta told me.
Adam’s back hit the barrier hard, and he used the semi-elastic surface to launch a leap that ended with him atop the dragon, which still had the cutlass stuck through its jaws.
Elizaveta saw what I was watching. “Adam should be able to take care of himself,” she said confidently. “He is a splendid beast.”
“Elizaveta,” I said, whispering furiously, “there are a lot of zombies out there.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “You can do something about that, Coyote’s daughter. And I do not know why you are waiting. My barrier will not stop you.”
“What—” I started to ask her, but I was interrupted by a commotion followed by the crack of wood.
I looked up to see the senator’s chair sliding along the concrete on its side. I couldn’t immediately see a cause for it—so it was probably something Wulfe had done. When it had gone over, it’d knocked over a small table where the witches had kept an array of sharp objects.
I jogged over, one eye on Wulfe and the witches. To my shame, Senator Campbell had not been a priority for me, though he was the most vulnerable of us. It was past time to get the senator free of his bonds so at least he could run. Not that running would help him escape the zombies, but maybe he could get out of the way of stray blows not directed at him.
Rather than try to pull the chair upright, I just used a short-bladed knife that had been among the witches’ scattered implements. It had no trouble slicing through the ropes Campbell had been tied to the chair with. Once he was freed, I helped the senator lurch to his feet.
With a hand under his elbow, I urged him to the relative safety of the space near Elizaveta. She might even be inclined to help keep him alive. I gave him the knife and he went to work on his gag. As I turned to see what the witches were doing, I got a whiff of fresh blood—a lot of it. We’d left a blood trail behind us. The senator’s pant leg was wet with it—and someone had chewed a hole in his leg.
I reviewed that first flash of a glance I’d taken upon my arrival to the tableau on the patio. Abbot had been curled around Senator Campbell’s leg. He’d evidently been chewing. I didn’t know if he’d been doing it because he was a witch and powering himself up with the senator’s pain. Or if he was a zombie now. He hadn’t smelled like a witch when I’d met him before—but male witches aren’t as powerful as the females. It was possible that Magda’s scent had masked his.
I looked for Abbot, but I didn’t see him. Maybe he’d ended up on the outside of Elizaveta’s circle.
I scanned the darkness, but all I could see were the zombies crowded thickly around us. They were all focused on coming to Magda’s aid. As Wulfe had said, the majority of them were humans, but I saw a border collie and a pair of cats.
I glanced over at the witches and was caught in the beauty of their battle. The stench of black magic was so thick that it seemed almost unconnected with the fight between Wulfe and the witches.
I could not see the magic, just felt it on my skin and in my flesh. Some was so vile that I felt as if I would never be able to wash it from my body. Some of it was sharp and sparkly, and it felt the way fireflies look. But that, too, seemed unconnected to their combat. Impossible that such foulness could be a part of the beauty of their dance. When the fight had begun, it had been a thing of gestures, of hands and fingers. Deep into their battle, they moved as if they were doing kata—quick and graceful movements that used their whole bodies.
Wulfe’s body had the fluid grace of one of the big cats. Patience’s dance consisted of small, efficient movements—precision was her guiding force. Magda—the one I’d have expected grace from—moved instead with jerks and stomps. There was power in her dance, but not elegance.
After a few seconds I began to see the flow of power. I couldn’t see the magic that passed between them, but I could infer the path from the connections between the three of them.
I’d seen crime scenes on TV shows where yarn was strung to trace lines of bullet trajectories. If there were enough bullets fired, the string pattern was oddly beautiful, like a freshman art project. The witches’ combat reminded me of that.
One of the zombies was big enough it caught my eye and I turned to see that the dragon zombie—a huge wound across its face beginning to scab over as I watched—was dragging its claws against the invisible wall of Elizaveta’s working. The cutlass was gone.
Adam’s life was bright and whole on the other side of our bond. I could feel the wild joy of battle shiver into my blood. Adam was fine.
“Mercy,” Elizaveta said. “You can free them—”
“Vampire,” called Magda triumphantly over the top of Elizaveta’s voice. “He’s a vampire, Ishtar.”
“Abbot,” purred Death. I mean Patience. Patience is not nearly as scary as Death, right?
The dragon zombie turned its attack to the ground, digging in the dirt at the base of the concrete. Concrete—the kind poured for patios—would not have slowed down a werewolf, and it didn’t slow down the dragon, either. For a zombie, this one was smart.
This is wrong, said Coyote’s voice in my head, and he didn’t mean the way the dragon was burrowing into our zombie-free zone.