“I’m asleep, Mercy. It’s a guy thing. We like to sleep after sex.”

“Frost wanted to take over the North American vampires, and he mostly managed it,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed, rolling over so he could look at me. “For this you wake me up?”

“He intended to bring them out to the public,” I said. “So they could hunt like vampires of old.”

“That’s what he said,” Adam agreed.

“But that would be stupid,” I said. “If the vampires come out—especially if they are engaging in hunting in ways that terrorize the human population—they’ll be hunted into extinction.”

“Yes.” Adam’s voice was patient. “He’s not the first idiot to attain power.”

“He corrupted and then funded the Cantrip agents who kidnapped the pack and tried to force you to kill Senator Campbell.”

“Yes,” said Adam slowly—and I knew he saw it, too.

“You thought that they didn’t care if you were successful or not, thought they had a backup plan to kill him. All they wanted was to pin the attempt on werewolves.”

“Yes.” Adam sat up. Then he got out of bed and started to pace as he ran through the patterns that I was painting. He had a better understanding of politics than I did because he actually trod the halls of power occasionally.

He stopped to look out the window. He was naked and I got a little distracted.

“Sorry,” I said, “I was distracted by the scenery. What did you say?”

He grinned at me, showing a flash of dimple. “I said, what if we assume that Frost wasn’t stupid?”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Let’s say that he was a witchborn vampire,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“It’s like your miniature zombie goats,” he said. “The important thing isn’t the ‘miniature’ or the ‘goat,’ it’s the ‘zombie.’ With Frost, the important thing isn’t the ‘vampire.’ It’s the ‘witchborn.’ If we look at it like that, then he was engineering the downfall of werewolves and vampires.”

I nodded. “And then he wasn’t being stupid. So what does that have to do with what the witches are trying now?”

“Damned if I know,” he said, after a long moment.

I pulled the covers up under my chin. “Me, either. But it clears up a few things.”

“So that was what was keeping you up?” Adam asked.

I nodded.

“You can sleep now?”

“And so can you,” I promised.

Adam shook his head slowly and lowered his brows, his eyes flashing gold for a moment. “Nudge,” he said.

* * *

? ? ?

I fell right asleep afterward, feeling warm and comfortable and safe.

That didn’t last long.

I dreamed that I was walking along a road. It seemed familiar, somehow. I couldn’t quite place it until I realized that there was someone walking with me.

“You could have picked anywhere,” I told Coyote. “Why did you choose a dirt road in the middle of Finley?”

Coyote stopped walking and I turned to face him.

“Because,” he said soberly, “it is better to come home.”

I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

“I have,” he said, “some information for you.”

“What is that?” I asked.

Coyote didn’t answer me in words.

* * *

? ? ?

I was locked in a cage with my brother, and I hurt. I was scared and he was scared and we huddled together in joined misery. We lived in moment-to-moment terror, waiting in dread for when we were taken out of the cages again. When the new witches came, when the old ones screamed out their lives, I was glad because I thought they’d forget about us.

I was wrong.

It took me a while to come to myself enough to realize what had happened. Coyote had put me into the mind of Sherwood’s cat sometime before the Hardesty witches killed Elizaveta’s people. I was dreaming, I remembered, so all I had to do was wake up.

But I couldn’t wake up.

Time did not speed up like it did in normal dreams. Minutes crept by like minutes. Hours were hours. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to move—but my catself cleaned my brother’s face so he’d know he wasn’t alone. It comforted us. All three of us.

The cat became aware of me at some point. He didn’t seem frightened by having a visitor inside his head, though I couldn’t communicate with him very well. I crooned to him while the witches did their work, harvesting our misery. I don’t know if he heard me or not.

“Amputation and mutilation are not effective,” the witch the others called Death told the young woman who had taken our eye with disapproval. “The shock can kill the animal, and that is a waste of potential magic to be harvested. They aren’t human, and they don’t realize that you have done permanent damage, so there is no additional boost from emotional trauma.”

The cat and I disagreed with her. But we didn’t tell her so.

The other witch, who was Elizaveta’s kin, who had spent the last few days learning from Death, prodded our new wound and then coated it with a paste that made us cry piteously.

In my human life I had found that witch dead (will have found her dead) in the workroom of Elizaveta’s house. Militza. I was not sorry that she would die.

The cat’s senses were different from my coyote’s, from my human ones. He could see the ghosts better than I could, and he saw the witches as entirely different from the humans. The witches mostly appeared oddly twisted—not visually, but to some other sense I could find no human correlation for. I knew, because the cat knew.

Death, on the other hand, was a black hole so dense that we shivered from the icy cold of it. She was scary on a level that if we could have willed ourselves to die before she ever touched us again, we would have.

The zombie witch was there, too. She had a touch of that fathomless void that watched us as we watched it. We grew to know her, as we did Elizaveta’s witches. But because I knew that they all died, the cat and I ignored Elizaveta’s family and watched the Hardesty witches. We learned who they were and what they wanted, and it terrified us.

After a number of days had passed, I forgot that I was not the cat.

When Death stopped the world, I huddled with my brother and felt the life leave his body. I waited for her to take me, too. I felt her magic sweep over me, but it could not take hold. I hid against my dead brother and tried not to attract her notice.

* * *

? ? ?

My face was pressed against gravel, my paws . . . fingers dug into the ground as I curled tighter into myself and sobbed for my dead brother, making hoarse, ugly sounds. I cried for the creatures who died to feed Death’s appetite, and I cried for the darkness in the world.

A man’s voice crooned to me, saying words that didn’t make sense. I knew that voice, but it did not bring me any comfort.

But a warm blanket was laid over me, and the night sky gave way with bewildering swiftness to golden sun that warmed the blanket and made me feel safer. I breathed in the familiar scents of sage, sun, and fresh air.

“Come home, little coyote,” said Coyote. His voice was as gentle as I’d ever heard it, and he petted the top of my head. “You are safe. For now, anyway.”

After a while I quit crying, though I remained curled in a ball in the middle of the road. His touch was an anchor that kept me from drifting back into the witch’s lair.

“Those times are all in the past and beyond changing,” he said, and then his hand stilled. “Huh. I had wondered how that single half-grown cat escaped Death. I found it was convenient because if I’d used one of the animals who died it might have killed you, too. He didn’t appear to be special—and now I find that I saved him myself and didn’t know it. How clever of me.”

I braced myself on my arms and sat up. My whole body ached down to the bone. His hand fell away from my head, but that was okay, I didn’t need it anymore.

He smiled brightly at me, rising to a crouch but keeping his face at my level. “I guess you could claim credit, too. If you hadn’t been with him when Death called—resistant as you are to the magic of the dead—he would have died, too.”

I cleared my throat and tried to speak but my mouth was too dry. I swallowed a couple of times and tried again. “You suck.”

He beamed and rubbed his chest with false modesty. “I do try.” Then all the laughter left him.

“The Hardesty witches are abominations. They take death, a change that is sacred, and they profane it. Kill them, my child. Kill them and kill their kin.”

I looked at him, inclined, after my sojourn, to agree with him. Instead I held up one finger. “You aren’t the boss of me.” I held up a second finger. “I am not an assassin.” I held up a third finger. “Who are you to complain about making the sacred profane? Isn’t that what you do?” I held up a fourth finger. “I am, in this moment, more inclined to kill you than anyone else.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “Good. Good. Take that anger and remember, all I did was allow you to see what they are.”

“What do you care about them for?” I said. “Did one of the witches place a curse on you?”

He hung his head and looked up at me through his lashes. His eyes were mournful and sly. “Yes,” he said, then shook his head. “No.”