He considered that. I felt quite clearly that he wasn’t sure—but he decided to trust them.

A piercing whistle carried over the grounds. Adam’s muzzle wrinkled and he turned his head, eyes glittering.

“Easy there,” I said. “Do you think you can get the wolf to fake obedience?”

The wolf was the one who answered me. How could I doubt that he, who was such a patient hunter, could wait out the witches? He could lie in wait for days if necessary.

Adam had no ego—confidence, but no arrogance. The same was not true of his wolf.

I smiled and kissed his nose, wolf and man with the same caress, then let the change take me to my coyote form.

“I’ll go let the others know that we have Adam,” Wulfe said. “I’ll meet you by the garden.”

Back to plan A with improved odds. I felt pretty good about that.

Adam ran back to the witches and I trotted behind him, veering off when we got to the garden. I was careful not to alert the crow, tucking myself under another raspberry bush.

I listened to the witches greet Adam on his return. They came to the conclusion we had expected from them. Then they resumed whatever they were doing that sounded like something wet hitting skin. Sometimes there were hissing sounds, and that was when I smelled burnt flesh.

I caught the scent of something else from that direction—a zombie. The sense of wrongness from this one made me feel vaguely ill, just from the awareness that it was present. As careful as I was to examine the scent, I couldn’t put a familiar name to the kind of creature it was. It smelled almost fae, but not. Like fire magic, I thought. The hot, bitter scent of Zee’s iron-kissed magic was something akin to it, too.

I had waited for maybe fifteen minutes before I decided I needed to see what awaited me on that porch.

I tensed to rise to my feet, when Wulfe’s hand came down on my back. I couldn’t scent him or see him, but I knew who it was. I don’t know how I knew . . . That wasn’t quite true. I didn’t want to understand how I knew it was Wulfe.

I see ghosts. But I know when a vampire is about, too. My kind used to hunt vampires when they first came to this country. It’s why there aren’t very many of us—the vampires were better hunters, and there were more of them.

But I knew it was Wulfe, so I didn’t yip or do anything to draw the witches’ attention back to the garden. My clothes dropped in a pile on the ground next to me, along with my gun and my cutlass.

“Don’t try using the gun on the witches,” Wulfe breathed into my ear. “It won’t work.”

His voice in my ear was weird because I couldn’t sense him with my normal senses, just with that odd gift I used to find the dead. I didn’t like having that connection to him. I didn’t want any connection to Wulfe.

I got to my feet and slunk along the ground toward the huge patio where there would have been room for the whole pack to congregate. There was plenty of room for a few witches, a senator, a werewolf, and a . . . I stopped moving because I simply couldn’t make myself look away.

Curled up next to Adam, and nearly double his bulk, was . . . a something. It was covered in iridescent white scales about six inches across. I couldn’t see its head, only a single silver-and-purple-laced wing—the other presumably on the other side of the dragon.

I put my head back down, and with even more care than before, I moved from one spot of darkness to the next—but it didn’t matter. Everyone on that patio was focused on something that wasn’t a coyote ghosting in the dark—or a freaking dragon zombie. I could feel their focus with the same hunter’s instinct that had kicked in when Elizaveta’s crow had detected me. While I was moving, all I cared about—aside from the dragon—was that no one was looking for me.

I didn’t look directly at the occupants of the patio until I’d come around to where the firepit wasn’t between me and them. Then I took it all in with a single encompassing look, before I let my gaze fall to the side.

I wasn’t the only hunter present. I didn’t know how good witches are at feeling eyes on them from the darkness. But the dragon was there. I had trusted Wulfe’s zombie-sleep spell absolutely until the dragon. But everything I’d ever heard about dragons (aside from the fact that there were no such things) told me that magic wouldn’t work on them. But since someone had turned one into a zombie, I was pretty sure that some magic had to work on them. What I didn’t know was how well Wulfe’s magic would work on the one on the patio.

I heard a slithery noise and glanced back over at the patio. The dragon had rolled over and was looking straight at me.

As I looked into its purple eyes, I felt its connection to the witch and through her to all the dead she commanded. Their connection was like spider silk in comparison to the stout chains of our pack’s bonds . . . but it was less unlike than I was comfortable with. Later that might bother me.

Right then I was more concerned by how many of them there were. For a moment, caught in our shared gaze, I felt them all—a great weight of misery that stretched across Elizaveta’s property. There weren’t ten or twenty of them. There were dozens. Hundreds. Some made with great care, others newly made and rotting already.

But they were not my task.

I closed my eyes, breaking our tie. When I opened my eyes again, I watched the dragon, but I did not look at its eyes. I moved cautiously and its gaze did not follow me. I couldn’t tell if it was still caught up in Wulfe’s spell, or if it was just indifferent to me.

There were other participants that I needed to take note of. Senator Campbell was gagged and tied to a chair, Abbot on the ground beside him. I had forgotten about Tory Abbot, the senator’s aide. I watched him, but he had his head down and wasn’t moving.

The senator was hurt. I couldn’t see anything specific because the flickering firelight hid the tones of his skin and most of him was covered by his clothes. But I could see pain in the hunch of his body.

He saw me. But he didn’t know what I was, and he probably assumed that I was another of the zombie witch’s creations, her abominations. Maybe, if he’d been paying attention to the witches’ conversation, he thought I was just a coyote. A short, sharp scream made him turn his attention away from me, toward the star of tonight’s show.

Elizaveta. They had stripped her naked and hung her upside down from the basketball hoop pole next to the house. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but the skin on her face was bruised darkly enough that I could see it, even in the poor lighting. Her white hair hung down in an untidy mess. Her arms hung limply, a few inches off the ground, bound together with heavy manacles that looked as though they belonged in a medieval dungeon.

Magda had her hands in front of her mouth, like a child in a candy store who was trying to decide which flavor was best when all of them were wonderful. She swayed a little and hummed. I’d had my eyes shut when she’d joined me in the garden, so this was the first time tonight that I took in her appearance.

She wore a light-colored, silky top with a scoop neck that was just low enough to display the triple strand of pearls that lay over her collarbone. Her slacks were darker, but her midheel pumps were the same light color as her top. Pink, I thought. But it might have been lavender. She looked as though she were dressed for a garden party fund-raiser for a high-powered politician. Or posing for a society article in a magazine, maybe titled “What the Well-Put-Together Witch Wears to an Outdoor Torture Session This Year.”

In contrast, Death looked like she was dressed for a jewelry heist. She was encased head to toe in black. But this was nothing new. The whole time I’d been with that poor cat in her laboratory, I’d never seen her in any color but black. Tonight she had on a long-sleeved, high-neck tunic top, black jeans, and silver-laced black boots that matched the ones the poppet had worn. The whip in her hand was black and she used it on Elizaveta.

Elizaveta was an old woman, in her early seventies, I thought. She was in good shape for a woman of her age—there were muscles under the thinning, slacking skin. But her age added to the indignity and horror of what they were doing to her.

Unlike the senator, Elizaveta’s skin, pale and exposed, displayed the damage they’d been doing. I hated it that somewhere in my head I could look at the welts, burns, and bruises on a naked old woman and think, They’ve been taking it easy on her tonight. And they haven’t had her up there too long. Because I knew what it looked like when the witches were really working someone over.

“Again,” said Magda. “Please, Ishtar, please. That felt like . . . better than the last witch, better than all the witches here. That felt like—”

“Power,” said Death. She hit Elizaveta again and both witches shivered with the aftereffects.