I slipped into the dense foliage of the grapevines and froze, hardly daring to breathe.

We’d planned for this, or something like this. Without Wulfe, we knew that I could very well trip one of the protections that Elizaveta or the witches had prepared. I had a couple of things I could do if I triggered them in such a way that my comrades would be otherwise unaware of it.

But the crow’s voice would carry well enough for the vampire to hear. Now they would try to sneak into Elizaveta’s territory the way I had just done, if they could. Zee’s glamour was, he assured us, quite up to hiding their presence unless the witches looked for magic.

I waited for someone, anyone, to hunt for me.

Instead, there was a pop, more of a pressure release than an actual noise. The fire got louder and I heard, for the first time, the witches’ voices quite clearly. Another ward had gone down, somewhere between me and the porch.

“Did you hear that, Elizaveta, darlin’?” said Death in a sticky sweet voice. “You have a vermin problem in your garden?”

At the sound of her voice, my soul grew still, grew focused. For the first time since I’d walked into Uncle Mike’s, I wasn’t afraid.

For weeks, buried in the poor half-grown kitten’s head, I had let her hurt us, hurt others, because I was helpless to do anything else. I had had to bear mute witness to the foulness of her actions. Tonight we were going to stop her.

The skin on my muzzle wrinkled and I had to fight back a growl.

“What was that?” asked Magda, the zombie witch, just as the crow sounded off again. She wasn’t talking about any sound I’d made—she was talking about the crow-thing, because I hadn’t made any noise.

I could feel the animated crow’s attention brush by me, but I was out of its area of perception now. It settled back into an inanimate object with a mutter of indignation and a ruffle of its feathers. This wasn’t a zombie; there was no semblance of life, no smell of wrongness. It was merely a simulacrum designed to warn intruders off. Elizaveta’s work—its voice had sounded like the old witch trying to mimic what a crow might sound like, assuming the crow was Russian, and it smelled like Elizaveta’s magic.

Magda made no effort to be quiet or unobtrusive when she came to check it out. She was using her cell phone as a flashlight, but I wasn’t worried.

A coyote’s fur is every color and blends very well into the shadows. In broad daylight the witch would have had trouble finding me where I lay under the vines. At night, as long as I kept my eyes closed so the light didn’t catch the reflection, I was virtually invisible.

Magda marched into the garden as if she owned it. When both feet were in the worked soil, the crow came to life again.

“Hardesty witch,” it said in a soft raspy voice. “You don’t belong here. You should go before you meet your doom.”

“And who are you to say so?” the witch demanded.

But the crow wasn’t really talking to her. “Witch, witch, witch,” it cried. “Elizaveta, there is a witch in our garden. Witch, witch, witch.”

“It’s just an animation,” the zombie witch called. She turned around and tramped back out of the garden. “The crow that sits atop the scarecrow is bespelled.”

“A scarecrow that is a crow,” said Death. Her voice was quiet. I couldn’t tell if she was speaking to Magda, who was striding back to the concrete square at the back of the house, or if she was speaking to the other people on the patio.

“It’s that scarecrow in the garden,” Death said. “That’s quite clever; I wonder if it works on skunks.”

“I don’t have a coyote for my collection,” Magda complained. “Why couldn’t it freeze the creature when it catches it? What’s the use in something that shrieks like that?”

“The whole point of it is to chase the creatures out of the garden,” Death said. “I’m sorry about the coyote; it will be miles away by now. If you really want a coyote so badly, we’ll set a live trap out tomorrow. Likely the creature will be back.”

“If she knows what’s good for her, she’ll be long gone,” said Elizaveta, making it clear that she knew who the coyote the crow had announced was. She sounded awful. Her voice was so hoarse that between the roughness and her Russian accent, I almost didn’t understand her. “Pity she didn’t come up through the lawn; she could have taken a nip out of you and not one of my little pretties would have warned you.” She coughed and spat.

Elizaveta, I thought, relief running through my bloodstream in a wash of hope. You haven’t thrown in with the bad guys in this.

But my relief came too soon.

“Adam,” said Magda, “be a dear. Go find that coyote for me, kill it, and bring it back.”

Death snorted. “Really? Don’t we have enough to do tonight that you need to make another of those things?”

I didn’t hear Magda’s reply. I was too busy putting as much distance between me and that porch in as short a time as I could manage.

Adam wouldn’t have a choice. I’d seen what that witch had made Elizaveta’s family do to each other, and to themselves. They were trained witches and they’d had no chance against Magda.

I was faster than most of the werewolves, I reassured myself. I put my head down and ran for all I was worth.

* * *

? ? ?

I didn’t make it a hundred yards before Adam’s teeth closed on the back of my neck and bit down. His momentum hit me sideways and we both tumbled to the ground and rolled. His teeth never left my neck.

They didn’t close down, either.

I lay limply on the ground, smelling my own blood in the night air. Adam crouched over the top of me. He growled, true anger in his voice, and I could feel the mate bond light up like a bonfire, sizzling flames burning through the muck of Magda’s compulsion with the force of Adam’s frustrated fury. Relief blossomed over me so strongly I don’t think I could have moved if I tried.

Our connection wasn’t comfortable, but I didn’t care. His rage rolled over me first and his wolf let me know that he was not impressed with my brains or obedience. How dare I risk this, that he might be forced to kill me?

But beneath the rage was terror, so I let him get by with the insults. Relief hit him a few seconds later, as it had me. He let me go and lay down next to me, shivering once. Excess adrenaline, I thought. I felt the buzz, too.

Wulfe appeared a dozen yards off and gave us both a disapproving look. “When I told you that I thought your touch might free him from her hold—given your immunity to their magic—I didn’t mean that you should touch your throat to his teeth. That generally doesn’t work as well.”

Adam rose, head lowered, ears pinned.

I shifted to human and touched his shoulder. “He’s on our side this time,” I told him. “I think.”

“Thanks for that,” Wulfe said with a smirk.

I looked at him. “Adam is free. What’s the plan now?”

“I don’t think the plan needs to change,” he said after a moment. “Adam should go back to the witches; they’ll think he failed to catch the coyote. As long as you do what she tells you, she’ll think you are still in thrall.”

“And if she figures it out?” I asked. “I don’t want to lose Adam to her again.”

His eyebrows rose. “Keep your bond open the way it is now. I don’t think she can get him as long as you do.” He looked at Adam. “It looks to me like all the players are out on the patio. I heard Elizaveta. Is the senator there, too?”

Adam nodded.

“Go back there and look like nothing is wrong,” Wulfe said. “I plan on making an entrance and then killing the witches. Mercy was going to see if she could manage to touch you—because I was pretty sure, given how mate bonds work, that would allow her to lend you her natural talent. Then she was going to go plant herself out of sight, where she would watch for an opportunity to get the senator out of harm’s way. And looky, now there are both of you to save the senator, while yours truly bears the brunt of the battle.”

He left out the way I was going to help kill the witches. Wulfe was not stupid. Bat-in-the-belfry bizarre, maybe. Psychopathic, certainly. But not stupid.

Adam thought about Wulfe’s plan. Then he made a chuffing sound and gave a pointed look all around us. I could smell them, too. He paused, because there was a zombie standing twenty feet away.

She could see us, but she didn’t do anything but watch. This one, I was afraid, was someone they had killed here. She was not well made; there was a rotting patch in the center of her right cheek through which I could see her teeth and tongue. She was about Jesse’s age.

“Wulfe spelled them to inattentiveness for now,” I told Adam. “It won’t hold if the witch calls them. But Zee and Tad are out here, too. Their part is to take care of the zombies. They already took care of the ogre.”

Adam tilted his head to me, and our mate bond rang with his warning.

“Something worse than the ogre?” I said. “Do you think that Zee will be overmatched?”