them. Tami could deal with Joshua’s mother without harming her. Asil would deal with the wyrm he could now hear moving around in the room behind.
The doorway between this room and the next was closed with a pair of old pallets tied together with yarn. The pallets held back the sea of stuff that filled the room beyond, though a few things were starting to slide over the top.
“Helen,” said Tami behind him—her magic making his skin crawl. “Listen to my words.” And then she started a chant, slow and melodic and filled with power. For a white witch, he noted, most of his attention on the wyrm, she had a lot of power.
He stepped to the side—remembering the avalanche of things that had cascaded into the hall when they released the children before using his sword to sever the yarn. But the pallets remained in place.
Behind him, Tami’s magic writhed and built with her chant. Writhed and built—and changed. Surprise would have cost Asil his life as Tami lashed out with her magic—lashed out at him.
But his wolf had not trusted the witch, even though she had smelled as white as snow.
When black magic blasted at them, Asil’s old wolf threw him to the side. The scourge of foulness washed by, leaving him choking on the reek of it. He rolled to his feet and saw Helen lying motionless on the floor and Tami’s face twisted in hatred.
Black witch, his wolf informed him, rage and smugness intertwined.
How had she hidden what she was from him? He who knew so intimately what black magic felt like?
“You killed my mother,” Tami said—incomprehensibly.
He didn’t have time to try to figure out what she meant because she hit him with a second blast of black magic. This was weaker, though—that first hit had taken too much for her to do it a second time, he thought.
He was old, and after his mate’s death, he’d made hunting down black witches the focus of his life for several centuries. He knew some tricks for dealing with witchcraft. He used pack magic to shield himself. It was like fighting a forest fire with snow—he managed to turn her power from a killing stroke into something that merely held him where he stood.
“Your mother?” he asked. It had been a hundred years or more since he had last killed a witch—and witches, unlike werewolves, were not immortal. Not commonly.
Ignoring him, she reached up to grab her amulet—and he saw it clearly for the first time, as if it had heretofore hidden itself from him. He had never seen it before, but he knew it. Mariposa’s work. His foster daughter had a talent for hiding things in plain sight, making one thing seem like another: a complex magical item appeared to be a piece of costume jewelry, or black magic felt like white. His recognition of what that amulet did robbed its spell of the rest of its power. The corrupt feel and smell of Tami’s magic filled the space around them.
But Asil’s attention was all on one thing: Mariposa. He’d thought he was through with her.
“Mariposa was not your mother,” he said, sure of that much. She didn’t smell like Mariposa. The amulet’s power was broken—but that didn’t matter, because no magic would have been powerful enough to hide the feel of Mariposa from his wolf.
“She was my mother in all that matters,” said Tami. “And you killed her.”
He didn’t argue. Mariposa had died hunting him, though it was not Asil who had broken her neck.
“How did you set this up?” he asked, buying a little time for him to work on her spell. “Our not-date?”
“I didn’t,” she said with a wild little laugh. “You could have knocked me over with a feather when you walked into the restaurant this evening and told me your name. How many werewolves are there who call themselves Asil? I am fated to be your death, old wolf. A circle of fate—you killed her, and I will kill you.
“Joshua always visits his sisters on Friday nights,” she told him. “I knew if something happened, he would call me. So I ensured