We leaned against each other for a few seconds more, and then he stepped back reluctantly.

“Okay,” he said to me, his hands lingering on my shoulders (I found that my hands were reluctant to let go of him, too). “Back to business.”

“Yep,” I said. “Okay. Back to business.” I pulled my shirt down to cover my belly and then stood at mock attention. “I’m ready.”

He nodded. “I need you to go into Elizaveta’s house and see if you can find out if the person who created your miniature zombie goats in Benton City is the person who killed all of Elizaveta’s family. And if it isn’t, see if you can pick up anyone else’s scent.” He frowned. “Look for the magic that is left, Mercy, and see what it tells you. Look for strangers.”

“I can do that,” I told him slowly. “Just because I can’t pick out our zombie-making witch’s magic doesn’t mean it isn’t there, though. Differentiation between magic users isn’t something I’ve done. I don’t know that I’ve felt the magic of all of Elizaveta’s people.”

He nodded. “I need you to keep your eyes open while you go through the house. Tell me what you think.”

I frowned at him. I could tell something had really bothered him about what he’d found in there. Something more than all of the dead bodies. “Elizaveta isn’t a black witch—there is a stench to that.” She skirted the line pretty hard, but we’d know if she had started practicing black magic.

“Yes,” Adam said, and I relaxed a little.

Elizaveta and I were on shaky terms, but there was real affection between her and Adam. She liked him because he spoke Russian with a Moscow accent, and because, when she flirted with him, he flirted back. He liked her because she reminded him of some relative of his mother’s, an aunt I think, who came to visit them when he was nine or ten. I didn’t want Adam hurt.

“It’ll work best in my coyote form,” I told him and then added, because I didn’t want him to worry, “I’ve been bouncing back and forth capturing goats this morning. I can change again”—I could feel that—“but I’m not sure I can change back right away.”

He nodded. “Okay. I don’t think that time is so much of a factor that what you have to say can’t wait a couple of hours.”

What was it that he expected me to find?

“You coming with?” I asked.

He shook his head with a faint smile. He stepped back from me, finally, and I felt the loss of his touch. I’d been neck-deep in the craziness of reopening my garage. He’d been busy attending all his secret, hush-hush, middle-of-the-night meetings. We hadn’t had as much time together over the past few weeks as I was used to.

“If I come in, I might prejudice what you see,” he said. “Sherwood will go with you.” He glanced around and nodded to the peg-legged man who was in the middle of a quiet discussion with some other pack members.

Sherwood started over to us, his gait smooth in spite of the peg leg. He had a better prosthetic, and with that one on no one would ever have thought he was missing a leg. But most of the time when he thought there might be some action, he wore the peg leg, because the artificial limb was a lot more delicate and correspondingly more expensive.

“Sherwood?” I asked. Asking him to go into a witch’s house was unkind, I thought. It hadn’t been that long ago that he’d been discovered three-legged and half-crazed in a cage in a black witch’s den.

Adam said, “Sherwood knows the dangers better than anyone else here. I trust him to keep you safe.”

I looked up into Sherwood’s face with its wolf-wild eyes and said, “I thought you didn’t remember anything of your captivity?”

“Apparently some things are imprinted in my skin,” he said, his voice a few notes darker than usual. “Like the—” He broke off, shivered, and shook his head. “Never mind.”

“As soon as you’re done, we’ll gather the dead,” Adam told me. “Warren will bring our firestarters back with him as soon as he can. I’ve spoken to Elizaveta and told her we need to burn the bodies. She wasn’t convinced until I told her about the goats. She said that if there is a necromancer with that much power to burn running around, she’d rather her family be turned to ash than become another witch’s puppet.”

There was something in his voice that concerned me. But I let it lie. I’d find out soon enough what had turned this from a tragedy for our pack’s witch into something more.

* * *

? ? ?

Going into a house full of dead bodies wasn’t on the top ten of my bucket list. Going into a witch’s house with dead bodies was even lower on my scale of happy.

But Adam had asked it of me, so I went. Sherwood stayed in human form, but he didn’t look any happier about going in than I felt.

He opened the front door and turned on the lights.

“This house is dark,” he told me. “A little light doesn’t hurt anything.”

The front door opened directly into a living room that looked warm and friendly. Light-colored walls set off wooden floors that were covered in expensive-looking carpets that were, in turn, covered with comfortable-looking furniture. Big windows let in a lot of natural light, and two skylights let in more.

There was plenty of natural light. I gave Sherwood a puzzled glance, and then I walked through the door.

It didn’t feel light and friendly. It smelled like death, witchcraft, and black magic. The combination was stomach-turning. Suddenly the extra little bit of brightness from the lights didn’t seem like overkill at all. Anything that might brighten up the spiritual atmosphere, however insignificantly, was welcome.

“I know,” said Sherwood grimly when I sneezed in protest of the smell. “But you get used to it.”

There were no bodies in this room, but I looked around thoroughly anyway. Adam had noticed something that bothered him in this house, bothered him more than Elizaveta’s dead family, and I needed to figure out what it was.

The bodies began in the kitchen, three of them. I am not a medical professional. I’m a predator, yes, and I kill things. But my victims (mice and other small rodents, usually) die quickly from broken necks. I’m not a cat; I don’t play with my food.

Elizaveta’s family members—I recognized each of these, though I didn’t know their names—were missing pieces. Mostly fingers, ears, toes—survivable amputations. The woman was missing her nose.

They all wore pants and the woman had on a loose unbuttoned dress shirt—no shoes, no socks. The clothes were filthy and smelled of blood and other things. Some of that was because of the usual effects of death, but some was older. Elizaveta would never have tolerated slovenliness in her family, so whoever had held them had not allowed them to bathe or change their clothes.

The woman’s body was folded over a bowl that contained beaten egg that had been fresh a couple of hours ago. When I came to that, I took a good look at the room and where the bodies were. There was toast in the toaster and several slices on a large plate next to it. The stove was off, but there was a frying pan on it. On the counter next to the stove was a package of bacon—unopened, which was why I hadn’t smelled it earlier.

These people had been tortured—and some of the wounds were very fresh. All three of them had been in the middle of making breakfast, judging by the condition of the kitchen. Who gets tortured and then decides to make a meal? Witches, evidently. Strange. Even more strange was that they had died very quickly and all at the same time.

I examined each of them, sniffing their bodies. Then I went through the kitchen itself, pantry and all. The next room, a workroom of some sort, had four more bodies.

There was nothing wrong with any of these people, no wounds new or old. It looked as though they had dropped where they stood. I recognized only the teenaged girl. Her name had been Militza. She went to school with my stepdaughter, Jesse, though Militza was a couple of years younger. Jesse sometimes gave her rides home from school, though not recently.

Jesse had privately told me that Militza gave her the creeps. I’d told Jesse to tell Militza to find another ride. I think Jesse had been more polite than that.

“There are fourteen bodies,” Sherwood said dispassionately, as I explored the room. “Adam described them to Elizaveta, and she identified them. No survivors. Stop right there, don’t open that cabinet. There’s a sigil on the door. I don’t know what it will do, but I doubt it is anything nice.”

I stopped. I couldn’t sense anything over and above the magical-crafting residue that impregnated everything in the room. It was strong inside the cabinet I stood in front of, but no stronger than it had been other places. Apparently, Sherwood had a more subtle understanding of magic than I did. I found that very interesting.

Sherwood didn’t speak again until I’d moved on.