feel a bit of pull from the pack ties. Adam would have been able to find me—find any of the pack he wanted to locate. But they weren’t the Alpha, and the best they could (hopefully) do would be to know that I was terrified out of my mind.
Zee had had another word with the tunic that Tad wore, and Tad became very, very difficult to see. Wulfe gave a soft whistle when he saw it change.
“So that’s what that is,” he said. “I thought that surcoat was lost in the War of the Roses.”
“Someone made it,” said Zee. “Someone took it. Someone took it back. It was not lost.”
“Hush now, miscreants,” I said. “We’re hunting witches.”
Tad, doubtless hearing the edge of utter terror that I was trying to cover up with humor, ruffled my hair. “We’ve got your back.”
“So do the zombies,” said Wulfe in a whisper that sent the hairs on the back of my neck climbing right onto the top of my head.
“Shut up, Wulfe,” I said. “I’m scared enough.”
“No,” Wulfe said, a little sadly or possibly a little smugly, “I don’t think you are.”
After that optimistic observation, we all lapsed into silence.
We could have approached from the front. Wulfe pointed out that they doubtless would have alarms all around the property. If Elizaveta had really gone over to their side, they might even have access to several circles of her protections. No, I didn’t know exactly what that meant, other than it was a bad thing.
But we voted three to one to approach from the rear—which had us traipsing through someone else’s property before we marched onto Elizaveta’s hayfield. After ten minutes of stumbling through the neighbor’s alfalfa field, I was pretty sure that Wulfe had been right, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.
Zee finally put a hand under my elbow. The old fae trod through the rough ground as if it were a flat field in daylight. Wulfe and Tad just ghosted through, too. I could have made a better show as a coyote—but that would have meant leaving my weaponry behind.
The first circle, we discovered, was halfway through Elizaveta’s neighbor’s field.
“Huh,” said Wulfe, from somewhere ahead of me.
“Hold up,” said Tad.
Zee stopped and I did, too.
Wulfe turned his head, looking at something I couldn’t see.
“That’s well done,” he said. “There’s a ward circle here.” He swept a hand ahead of him. “Well, not really a circle, more of a square—but that’s okay for something like this. Just a warning line. She’d have felt every squirrel or coyote”—he didn’t look at me—“that ran across it, but still . . .”
“She?” I asked.
“This is Elizaveta’s work,” Wulfe said. “What does it say that she has activated it?”
“Not much,” said Zee. “We can speculate, of course. Perhaps she has joined forces with them. Or perhaps they found the key to the house protections when they held Elizaveta’s family.”
“Yeah,” said Wulfe with theatrical sadness. “It doesn’t tell us much.” He scuffed his toe into the ground with exaggerated disappointment. In a five-year-old it would have been cute. In a very scary vampire it was . . . cute.
He bent down and drew a line in the dirt with his finger about two feet long. “If you will all step over the border right here?”
We did, and he brushed the marks out with his fingers.
Wulfe continued to take point. Ostensibly, this was so that he could keep an eye out for the kinds of things that we could not. Truthfully, there was no way I would have been able to let him trail behind me when I couldn’t keep track of where he was. I don’t think I was alone in that feeling.
It was Zee who held a hand up the next time. “Witch,” he said in a soft murmur, his attention focused ahead of us, “can you keep a battle quiet?”
I felt it, too. The feeling of wrongness that I was beginning to associate with zombies.
Wulfe frowned. “All of the zombies are confined to the yard,” he said.
“Evidently not,” said Zee. “Witch, keep this quiet if you can. Boy, draw your weapon. Mercy—do not try to shoot or stab this one. Your blade is fine, but it is not one of mine. It will not penetrate an ogre’s hide.”
Wulfe raised an eyebrow either in mild offense at the gruff order or in mild surprise at the knowledge that the zombie ogre was around, but he closed his eyes and began moving his hands in patterns. His