“Vampire,” he said.

And he gathered power, a black mass of crafting. Witch, I thought, not zombie. He strode forward as if he hadn’t just been hiding under a pile of wood, as if he hadn’t gnawed into the senator’s leg when Campbell was tied and couldn’t defend himself. He walked like a warrior wading into a familiar battlefield.

“Wulfe!” I screamed.

Wulfe was too busy with the witches to pay attention. I didn’t know what to do. Wulfe had made it quite clear that once he’d engaged in battle, I was to stay away.

Abbot pulled a knife from a pocket, flicked it open, and cut himself. Then in a gesture that reminded me of Sherwood’s motion earlier tonight, he flung his own blood at Wulfe’s back. I was too far away and it was too dark—the firelight was tricky, full of strong light and shadows—to see if it hit Wulfe.

But it must have. Because when Abbot took all the power he’d gathered and shoved it into his voice, saying, “Vampire,” Wulfe froze.

The two witches stopped their dance midmove. I don’t know what Magda’s face looked like, because I was watching the smile bloom on Patience’s face. Death’s face. Because patience is a virtue and there was nothing good about the expression on her face.

“Oh, vampire,” Magda said. “We haven’t had a vampire like you to play with in a long time. Ours used to be fun, but now she only curls up in a corner and cries.”

And just at that moment, the dragon’s claws broke through the concrete and my attention was forced to a more immediate problem. The zombie ripped a two-foot-square chunk away from the patio and hauled it down.

For a moment I could see a hole, and then it was filled with dragon. She’d misjudged; there wasn’t enough room for her to squeeze through. But she’d already proven that Elizaveta’s circle only went down to the ground, and that the ground and concrete were no match for her. It would only take a moment for her to widen the hole.

I don’t know why I didn’t run screaming. But Coyote’s voice still rang in my head. Also, after all the sadness I felt in seeing this thing that had once been a dragon, there was no room inside me for anything else—not even healthy emotions like terror or self-preservation.

Touch is important in magic.

I reached down and put my hand on her forehead. She couldn’t quite get her shoulders and forelimbs through, but all she would have had to do was twist her head and she could have taken off my arm at the elbow.

A bond lit up between us, bright and clean, a connection both like and unlike the kinds of bonds I was more familiar with. This wasn’t pack magic. This was a thing of Coyote, who was the spirit of free agency. Of choice, for good and ill. Of death and dying.

“Go,” I told the dragon. I put power into my voice, power that I’d learned from Adam, but I didn’t need to borrow from my mate for this. This power came from my father. I whispered, because this was not a power that needed volume. “Go. Be at peace.”

“No!” It was Magda’s voice, I think. “Stop her!” The dragon went limp beneath my fingers. Her body shrank as if the flesh were nothing without the terrible magic that kept it animate. She no longer filled the hole completely; soon other zombies would break through the opening she had made.

It didn’t take long. Something ripped the dragon’s desiccating body away and a woman began to slither through. She was smaller than the dragon—there was plenty of room for her.

But I was still caught in that odd headspace where I wasn’t afraid of the zombies—I was sad for them. I reached out, but this time I didn’t try to touch her skin. This time I reached out for the threads of power that bound this zombie to the witch whose creature she was.

Instead of grasping only her threads, my fingers closed on dozens of strings. They weren’t comfortable to hold, those bonds, too full of that terrible wrongness.

My grip didn’t feel firm enough, so I twisted my hands, winding those bonds around my forearms until they were made fast. Then I jerked, giving a tremendous pull that used my whole body.

When all of those bonds were straining and I was pulling with all of my weight, I took a breath. I said softly, with utter conviction, “Go. Be at peace.”

It felt so right. I felt as if I were full of light and joy. Of rightness—or at least the opposite of wrongness. I felt clean. And a wide swath of the zombies who had been trying to get onto the patio dropped as if poleaxed.

But there were more zombies. A lot more. I reached out and this time the bonds came eagerly to my hands, as if they were metal and I held a magnet. I took them, and spinning round and round, wrapped my whole body with them. Even as I did so, I felt a few of those threads break in bright, happy sparks—freedom found before I could gift them with it.

Dimly, I heard Tory Abbot say, “Wulfe, stop her.” But I was too caught up in the moment to pay much attention to his words.

The bonds let me watch Tad, clad in blackness that made him hard to see, a huge axe in his hands. I felt it hit the zombie whose bonds I held—and my awareness of Tad was gone as the zombie’s thread dissolved into fireworks followed by nothingness. If I had wanted to, I felt that I could have tracked Tad from zombie to zombie as he brought them to the final stillness and released the wrongness of their existence.

Zee’s path through my zombie-leashes was swifter than his son’s. I felt him move like a wave of destruction, his sword singing in joy, and they released zombie after zombie to wherever they would go after their long subjugation.

Adam. Oh, Adam was beautiful in his wrath. He danced with the dead and they fell before him like so many petals in the wind. I was tempted to stop and just watch him.

But I had a job to do.

I think I was a little power drunk. And maybe a bit dizzy.

I raised my hands to the skies and twirled like a top, a naked top. I probably looked a fool. But there was no room for self-analysis in me at that moment. I turned and turned and gathered them all, all the shiny, wispy threads of spider silk and all the zombies. Every last one, every creature bound unwillingly to unnatural life, I held them in my hands, wrapped around my body.

They would have done my bidding more eagerly than they had done the witch’s. I knew it, knew I held the power of an unstoppable army in my grasp. They could kill the witches, destroy any threat to me, to my pack, to the people I held dear. I held power in my hands such that had never been available to me before.

But in that moment in time, there was only one thing I wanted from them, one necessity that drove me.

I gave them my order.

“Go,” I whispered. “Be at peace.”

Wulfe’s hand closed ungently on my upper arm at the moment I spoke those words.

Two hundred fourteen . . . thirteen (as one fell beneath Adam’s fangs) sparks left their rotting corpses and flew away. Out in the darkness, the corpses dropped, abandoned puppets. Some of them I saw with my eyes; others I just felt.

Wulfe dropped, too, and lay unmoving at my feet.

I sat down abruptly beside him. I felt empty and aching, as though I’d been trampled by a herd of horses. Twice. The euphoria of the moment before was gone, vanished as quickly as it had come.

I didn’t know if I’d killed Wulfe when I released the zombies. Rekilled him. Removed him from his vampiric existence. I couldn’t decide how I felt about that.

“Passion fruit,” said Elizaveta, standing up abruptly from the chair Wulfe had tucked her into. I was almost sure the word really was “passion fruit” this time.

I felt the flutter as her circle fell and the patio was once more open to the night. It was a little easier to see the dead covering the ground, thicker near the patio, but the whole of the yard and beyond was full of bodies. A lot of those were human-zombie bodies.

With the zombies all deanimated, it was easy to pick out Adam, Tad, and Zee—they were the only ones left standing. Tad and Zee were turning in a wary circle, looking for a foe. Adam loped in my direction.

Elizaveta patted my head as she passed me. “Good,” she told me. “Now it is my turn.”

She walked slowly—no doubt hampered by the damage the witches had inflicted on her—but each step was easy and firm. She walked as if she owned the ground under her feet.

The three witches—Death, Magda, and Abbot—were staring around them, momentarily overwhelmed by the sudden destruction of their army. There was blood dripping from Magda’s nose and the ear nearest me.

“Stupid,” Elizaveta said in satisfied tones.

Death recovered first. She scowled and opened her mouth.

But before Death could say anything, Elizaveta raised her hand palm up and said, “Tory Abbot, Patience Ramsey, Magda Fischer. Die.”

I felt it again, that moment, that instant when everything stopped. To me it felt like a club of darkness that, even not directed at me, tried to freeze the blood in my body.

“Die,” said Elizaveta again.