Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson 11)

I didn’t know any of them, could have picked maybe two out of a police lineup—but fourteen? I didn’t like Elizaveta; she scared me. I had a hard time liking people who scared me. But I had known her for a long time, and she was ours.

And anyone who could wipe out Elizaveta’s family would have a shot at doing the same to a bunch of werewolves. Elizaveta might be the real powerhouse, but her whole family was formidable—or so it had been explained to me.

“Okay, then,” I said, thinking hard. “I’m not a witch. The only witch I’ve dealt with is Elizaveta. If this is important, maybe we should get a witch to look into it instead of me. There is that witch in Seattle that Anna knows. Should I call Anna and get her name?”

He considered it. Exhaled noisily through his nose and then said, “I think we have enough unknown players in the Tri-Cities right now. Maybe if we need an expert. I will check with Elizaveta when she gets back to me. As for the rest, I think you should come to Elizaveta’s house and see what we found. You have a better feel for magic, and that might be important. Even if Elizaveta comes as fast as she can, it will be days, not hours. Whatever traces of magic are there might dissipate before then.”

There was another little pause and he said, “And I need to get your take on what we found, not the opinion of a witch we don’t know and can’t trust. I need to make some decisions, and I’d like to see if your conclusions match mine.”

I disconnected and looked at Mary Jo, who was looking as shell-shocked as I was. “Do you think you could get Joel or Aiden . . . um—maybe Joel and Aiden might be better—to come and incinerate our poor victims? Preferably with some discretion? I don’t want Aiden’s picture all over the Internet.”

Joel wouldn’t have that problem. No one would associate the volcanic tibicena with Joel’s human form.

“Yes.” Mary Jo opened the car door and got out again. The seat tried to follow her and she set it back into the car. “Stay there,” she told it. To me she said, “No worries, Mercy. I’ll figure out how to do it out of sight. I have all the tools I need.” She held up her cell phone. “Go do what you need to do, Mercy. I’ve got your back.”

* * *

• • •

Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya had a sprawling house just a few miles from my home.

She used to live in town. But after the neighbors complained about the sound of her granddaughter’s nightly oboe practicing, she moved out to a house on five acres. She leased the land to a hay company—they didn’t come out at night, so no one was around to be kept up by Elizaveta’s granddaughter practicing her oboe.

I was sure her granddaughter had an oboe and that it was just coincidence that bad oboe playing can sound remarkably like screaming.

I hadn’t lied to Adam; I didn’t know much about witches, and the more I learned, the less certain I was about what I did know. As I understood it, witches had power over living things. Magic practitioners who could work with inanimate objects were wizards.

Witches got power from things of spiritual consequence. These included life-changing events: birth, death, dying, but also lesser things like emotions. Sacrifice, willing or unwilling, was supposed to have an especially great effect. They also did a lot of their work using body parts, bodily fluids—blood, hair, spit. I was a little vague on how that worked exactly.

Though there were three different types of witches, they all started the same way—they were born with certain abilities. At some point after that, they chose what they were willing to trade for power, staying white or becoming gray or black.

White witches generated power from themselves and the environment around them. They were less powerful than the other two kinds. The black witches tended to view them as fast food (and I wasn’t sure about the gray witches, either). Most white witches were paranoid and secretive. I had only met a few of them.

Black witches were power hungry. They went for the big power boosts—death, yes. But torture-then-death generated more power from the same victim. They fed more easily off their own kind, but they could use any living being. They actively pursued victims with magical connections. That probably accounted for the fact that few supernatural communities tolerated witches who practiced black magic. That and the fact that anything that scared the humans—and black magic was difficult to keep hidden—was bad for everyone else.

Black witches were the most powerful of all witches.

Most of the witches I knew were gray witches. I wasn’t sure of the exact line between gray and black, not from the witches’ side, anyway. I could tell the difference from a good distance—black magic reeks.

I thought that the difference between black and gray had something to do with consent. A gray witch could cut off a person’s finger and feed on the generated power of the sacrifice and pain, as long as their victim agreed to it. I was pretty sure that a gray witch could make zombies, but these had smelled of black magic.

As soon as I drove past the wall of poplar trees that marked the border of Elizaveta’s property, I could see that there were a lot of pack vehicles at the house. As I approached, Warren’s old truck pulled out of the drive. He slowed as he saw me, stopping in the middle of the road.

Since there wasn’t anyone coming, I did the same. He rolled down his window. The Jetta’s driver’s-side window didn’t work yet. I got out of the car and walked to Warren’s truck.

Aiden was in the front seat, looking like he should have had a booster chair. Joel, in his presa Canario dog form, took up the space between Warren and Aiden on the bench seat with some of him left over to spill onto the floor. It didn’t look comfortable, but Joel smiled at me anyway. Compared to his tibicena form, the presa Canario looked positively friendly.

“Heading to Benton City to burn some miniature goat zombies?” I asked.

Warren shook his head. “No, ma’am. Mary Jo had a disposal company come haul the dumpster out to the Richland landfill. We’ll turn the goats to ash out of sight and away from anything else that might catch fire.”

Yep. Mary Jo was competent. Too bad for her, because this was not how to get off my emergency call list.

“Then we come back here,” Warren said. He grimaced. “There are some things we need to burn here, too. But not until you check things out and the boss gets the okay from Elizaveta.”

“Bad?” I asked. “I mean, I know that Elizaveta’s family is all dead.”

He glanced at Aiden and sighed. “I think this gives ‘bad’ a new low.”

Aiden frowned at him. “I lived in Underhill, Warren. I don’t know what you all think you are protecting me from.”

“Just because you’ve seen bad things doesn’t mean you have to see any more,” said Warren with dignity.