your eyes open while you go through the house. Tell me what you think.”
I frowned at him. I could tell something had really bothered him about what he’d found in there. Something more than all of the dead bodies. “Elizaveta isn’t a black witch—there is a stench to that.” She skirted the line pretty hard, but we’d know if she had started practicing black magic.
“Yes,” Adam said, and I relaxed a little.
Elizaveta and I were on shaky terms, but there was real affection between her and Adam. She liked him because he spoke Russian with a Moscow accent, and because, when she flirted with him, he flirted back. He liked her because she reminded him of some relative of his mother’s, an aunt I think, who came to visit them when he was nine or ten. I didn’t want Adam hurt.
“It’ll work best in my coyote form,” I told him and then added, because I didn’t want him to worry, “I’ve been bouncing back and forth capturing goats this morning. I can change again”—I could feel that—“but I’m not sure I can change back right away.”
He nodded. “Okay. I don’t think that time is so much of a factor that what you have to say can’t wait a couple of hours.”
What was it that he expected me to find?
“You coming with?” I asked.
He shook his head with a faint smile. He stepped back from me, finally, and I felt the loss of his touch. I’d been neck-deep in the craziness of reopening my garage. He’d been busy attending all his secret, hush-hush, middle-of-the-night meetings. We hadn’t had as much time together over the past few weeks as I was used to.
“If I come in, I might prejudice what you see,” he said. “Sherwood will go with you.” He glanced around and nodded to the peg-legged man who was in the middle of a quiet discussion with some other pack members.
Sherwood started over to us, his gait smooth in spite of the peg leg. He had a better prosthetic, and with that one on no one would ever have thought he was missing a leg. But most of the time when he thought there might be some action, he wore the peg leg, because the artificial limb was a lot more delicate and correspondingly more expensive.
“Sherwood?” I asked. Asking him to go into a witch’s house was unkind, I thought. It hadn’t been that long ago that he’d been discovered three-legged and half-crazed in a cage in a black witch’s den.
Adam said, “Sherwood knows the dangers better than anyone else here. I trust him to keep you safe.”
I looked up into Sherwood’s face with its wolf-wild eyes and said, “I thought you didn’t remember anything of your captivity?”
“Apparently some things are imprinted in my skin,” he said, his voice a few notes darker than usual. “Like the—” He broke off, shivered, and shook his head. “Never mind.”
“As soon as you’re done, we’ll gather the dead,” Adam told me. “Warren will bring our firestarters back with him as soon as he can. I’ve spoken to Elizaveta and told her we need to burn the bodies. She wasn’t convinced until I told her about the goats. She said that if there is a necromancer with that much power to burn running around, she’d rather her family be turned to ash than become another witch’s puppet.”
There was something in his voice that concerned me. But I let it lie. I’d find out soon enough what had turned this from a tragedy for our pack’s witch into something more.
* * *
• • •
Going into a house full of dead bodies wasn’t on the top ten of my bucket list. Going into a witch’s house with dead bodies was even lower on my scale of happy.
But Adam had asked it of me, so I went. Sherwood stayed in human form, but he didn’t look any happier about going in than I felt.
He opened the front door and turned on the lights.
“This house is dark,” he told me. “A little light doesn’t hurt anything.”
The front door opened directly into a living room that looked warm and friendly. Light-colored walls set off wooden floors that were covered in expensive-looking carpets that were, in turn, covered with comfortable-looking furniture. Big windows let in a lot of natural light, and two skylights let in more.
There was plenty of natural light. I gave Sherwood a puzzled glance, and then I walked through the door.
It didn’t feel light and friendly. It smelled