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.
They obeyed Elizaveta, the three Hardesty witches, because there was no possibility for them to do anything else.
They died so fast that there was not even an instant for shock or disbelief. They just dropped dead.
I’d watched Patience use that spell to kill every living thing in Elizaveta’s house except for a cat. But Death had not lit up like a blowtorch when she consumed their lives. Elizaveta did. I had felt the magic Patience had harvested from dozens in that house the night Elizaveta’s family died. Immortal witches, Coyote had told me. And I’d known then where Death had gotten her immortality.
But I knew for a certainty that that houseful of life had supplied her with not a tithe of what Elizaveta farmed from the three witches. I felt the filthy magic wash into her and fill her as if she were an empty vessel beneath a water spout. Power lit her from within until I had to bring my arm up and shield my eyes.
My bones ached with the wrongness of that magic. But eventually the tide of filthy black magic faded. I brought my arm down so that I could see.
The first thing I saw wasn’t Elizaveta, though. While I hadn’t been watching, Adam had shifted all the way back to human. He stood, naked, every muscle in his body clenched like it hurt. His eyes were shut and the muscle in his cheek was twitching. As I watched, he drew in a breath and started to relax.
Elizaveta stood, her hand on his shoulder, beaming at him as if she had done him a favor—instead of pulling him through a full change, wolf to man, in what looked to have been an incredibly painful fashion.
As I watched, she stepped away from him and walked to the bodies of her victims. She knelt beside them and began frisking them like a professional thief. I rolled to my feet and staggered forward.
Elizaveta was on our side, I reminded myself. There