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.
I could think of her as Death because the alternative was Ishtar—essentially calling her a goddess, which I would not do. I had never heard her real name, though I had the impression that she hated it.
“I could do this all night, Elizaveta,” crooned Death, working up a rhythm with her whip. “You probably know exactly how wonderful this feels—yes, I had some lovely talks with your people. I almost kept one or two, but in the end decided I could use the power boost more. You have that much of a reputation, which should please you.”
She paused, surveying her work. There was a certain satisfaction in her body language. She took pride, I remembered, in the evenness of her lash work.
“I could break you, Elizaveta,” she crooned. “I could destroy your flesh and drink down your power.”
Magda squeezed herself and shivered. “I like it when you do that, Ishtar. Yummy.”
Death gave her a sympathetic smile. “I know, sweetheart. But I was given a task.” She started swinging again. This time there was no rhythm in it, no way to plan for the sting.
I knew how that felt.
“I could beat you to death,” she said. “We will drink your power and your pain, and my coven would find that acceptable. Particularly when you have given us such interesting toys and spells to take home. I bet you didn’t know that your grandson knew where you kept the family spellbook, did you? Stupid of you to leave him alive so long. He died knowing that he’d gotten his revenge.”
Robert, I thought, and had an instant, unbidden memory of his featureless, scarred face.
Elizaveta was beginning to pant, though it was more from emotion than from exhaustion. “Or you can surrender. We have ten bloodlines in our coven. Yours would be the eleventh. So close to a full coven. You’ve felt our power as a victim. Wouldn’t you love to feel it as one of us? I offer you power you could only dream about without us.”
“I am Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya, of house Kikimora. I can trace my bloodline a thousand years. Never would I join your ragtag band of mutts and rejects. I know who you are, Patience Ramsey. There is no house Ramsey. You do not know from where your witchblood comes. It was present in neither your mother’s nor in her husband’s lineage. Calling yourself Death does not make you a great witch, does not make legitimate your bloodline.”
She didn’t get it all out at once. But she did pull it off without screams or grunts, and I wasn’t sure that I would have managed it if I’d been in her place. By the end of Elizaveta’s little speech, Death—Patience—was trying her best to beat Elizaveta into silence.
I wasn’t just waiting around while the witches and Elizaveta had their chat. I used the fire and their preoccupation to slide all the way around the outer edge of the patio. It was really dark tonight; the moon was a bare sliver and there was a storm in the air that was covering the stars. If anyone had been looking, they would have seen me easily. But Elizaveta was giving them enough of a show that no one thought to look.
Except for Adam, who pinned his ears at me. And the dead dragon, which had turned its head in my direction.
I pinned my ears back at Adam. I was good at slinking unseen in plain sight. It was what coyotes do. And I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t have drawn the attention of the witches if I jumped up and ran around Adam singing “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.” They were enjoying themselves so much beating on Elizaveta, they were making this part much easier than it might have been.